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“... outstripped anyone’s claim to possess their own story. Here he is writing to his oldest friend, David Peltz, who is thinly fictionalised as Woody Selbst in the story ‘A Silver Dish’ and as George Swiebel in Humboldt’s Gift. ‘What matters,’ Bellow wrote to Peltz when he complained of being used, is that good things get written … We’ve known ...”

“... not to be one. In November the diagnosis of cancer was confirmed. The stock market fell, prompting Herbert Bismarck – who inherited his father’s nasty wit, if little else – to express surprise: ‘If I were a share, I’d be going up.’ Others reacted to the news with a more becoming regret, although not necessarily for the best of reasons. Those who ...”

“... of the working practices of the Elizabethan theatre is based, but the records of Sir Henry Herbert, Master of the Revels from 1622 to 1642, a complementary treasure-trove on Jacobean and Caroline court entertainments and dramatic censorship; Malone who first trawled systematically through the parish and corporation records of Stratford for the ...”

“... Bunker Man and to Kathleen Jamie’s poetry collection The Queen of Sheba. It is insistent in W.N. Herbert’s poem ‘Featherhood’ and Janice Galloway’s Foreign Parts. It bridges writing as different as the poetry of Carol Ann Duffy, Kate Clanchy or David Kinloch, and the fiction of Christopher Whyte or ...”

“... young man addressed in the Sonnets is the Earl of Southampton, not, as some still think, William Herbert, Earl of Pembroke. The Rival Poet of Sonnet 86 remains George Chapman, not, as some think, Samuel Daniel or Michael Drayton or Christopher Marlowe or Ben Jonson or, since his was assuredly an ‘alien pen’ (Sonnet 78), Torquato Tasso. Candidates for the ...”

“... Fourteen inches by 11, and weighing six pounds 13 ounces, David O. Selznick’s Hollywood is less a coffee-table book than a coffee table without legs. Its credits ape a blockbuster movie’s: ‘Executive Producer: Robert Gottlieb – Associate Producer: Martha Kaplan’, etc; and its first page opens like cinema curtains on a wider-than-Panavision main title modelled on Gone with the Wind ...”

“... meeting immediately after his resignation from the Government in 1951, Dalton passed a note to Herbert Morrison comparing him to Oswald Mosley. Afterwards he noted that Bevan had been ‘sweating and screeching and seemed on the edge of a nervous breakdown’. Ten months later, he recorded another party meeting, at which Bevan ‘made a violent speech, of ...”

“... at the Munich Kammerspiele in September 1922 – it was the first performance of one of his plays. Herbert Ihering, an influential Berlin critic, wrote that Brecht had ‘changed the face of German literature’ and ‘brought to our age a new voice, a new sound and a new vision’. In the same year, Brecht married the opera singer Marianne Zoff; their ...”

“... status that the period accorded to literary translation – the King James Bible. Donne and George Herbert were only the most conspicuous clergy-poets of their time. Milton would have joined their number had he not been repelled by the ‘popish’ trend of the Caroline Church. Devotional poems of Herbert and Milton are ...”

“... to be put through antic paces. In such poems I am reminded of Hamburger’s friends, Edwin Muir, David Gascoyne, Vernon Watkins and Robert Francis, poets whose common styles share the knowledge of what words have gone through. What such knowledge proposes is patience, certainly not the petulance in which Hamburger indulges himself when the bad humour takes ...”

“... Cup Final ...’ ‘When we had Huw Wheldon at the BBC ...’ ‘When we were first married ...’ David Hare calls the curators of these arcadias the ‘whenwes’. They guard their territory with a dogged devotion. Although the theatre is a medium that exists entirely in the present tense, it is not immune to the arcadian virus: ‘the National Theatre at ...”

“... are commonly brought up to show that the modernist impetus survived in the generation after Pound: David Jones, Anglo-Welshman; Basil Bunting, Northumbrian Englishman; and Hugh MacDiarmid, Lowland Scot. The claim for Jones seems the weakest: it is advanced by Jones’s admirers, not by the poet himself, who took no interest in the question, having other fish ...”

“... pictures at the leading avant-garde gallery in London, the Mayor, and had had a work reproduced in Herbert Read’s Art Now; as to designing furniture, well, Giacometti did that too. On the subject of career-manipulation, Bacon in reality was and has remained a rather maladroit manipulator, too obsessed with painting and pleasure to be bothered. Thus in ...”

“... the counties nearest the shore, where the switch of allegiance was comparable to the turn against Herbert Hoover at the nadir of the Great Depression. In his opponents’ local campaign literature Wilson was symbolised by a black shark fin. It made no sense: the president hadn’t summoned the sharks and was powerless to mend the damage. But the strategy ...”

“... of what’s past, present, or to come: insensible of mortality, and desperately mortal’. David Smith finds most of this description eminently applicable to H.G. Wells (whom he intensely admires) and he adopts its final two words as a subtitle for his biography. What sense Shakespeare attached to them is doubtful. Johnson suggests ‘likely to die in ...”