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“... and portcullis,’ he said. He once wrote a sweetly affectionate letter to Ronnie and Henriette Duncan (‘Come my dearest dears’) and, having completed it, wrote vertically up the margin: ‘Do not read this letter as a softness. I am hard as fucking nails.’ You wonder how they took so bizarrely double-minded a letter. He could write very tenderly ...”

“... beginning.’ Daily life there ‘added up to one long steady protest’, with poets – Robert Duncan, Robert Bly, Gary Snyder – joining in: the engagé styles that repelled other American writers showed Heaney ‘what it meant to be American. There was a trust that things could be changed.’America meant stylistic liberties too. ‘By 1972 … I had ...”

“... fleetingly evokes light-music classics by Anthony Collins (a notable conductor of Façade), Trevor Duncan or Ernest Tomlinson. In a sense (an uncharitable one) Walton is the greatest British composer of light music, transforming it at will but retaining its immediacy in a surprising variety of contexts. The popular-tune quality of Façade leads straight into ...”

“... after white supremacists held their ‘Unite the Right’ rally in Charlottesville, Virginia, Donald Trump’s (then) chief of staff, John Kelly, went on Fox News and delivered a history lesson. ‘The lack of an ability to compromise led to the Civil War,’ he said. ‘Men and women of good faith on both sides made their stand where their conscience had ...”

“... so hate anyone who can.’ Among others who leapt to the defence of culture as they knew it were Donald Hall, Herbert Gold, Delmore Schwartz, Truman Capote (on Kerouac: ‘that’s not writing, that’s type-writing’), Robert Brustein and James Dickey (‘Howl is the skin of Rimbaud’s Une Saison en Enfer thrown over the conventional maunderings of one ...”

“... sure ‘whether the Western way of life, and our liberal democratic systems, can survive’. Donald Trump has also chimed in, asking ‘whether the West has the will to survive’. These apocalyptic Westernists long to turn things around, to make their shattered world whole again. David Goodhart, the founding editor of Prospect, told the New York Times ...”

“... furniture in their drawing room, turning the ‘cosy nooks and corners’ inside out and getting Donald to help him shift the piano. This was, in essence, what he did for the rest of his life, putting objects and people – often making little distinction between those categories – into relationships such that a certain mood or effect would be ...”

“... Me Not’; but there we go. I’m not sure which was which; but one of them I sent to Ronald Duncan at the Royal Court. Immense crowd scenes, people standing around, pitying the hero – i.e. me.It sounds very like Duncan.It was. This Way to the Tomb was his big play at the time. I liked that title.You say you also ...”

“... week since the vote. The Tories appear to have found their Hillary Clinton, and disposed of their Donald Trump. The real Hillary Clinton will be breathing a sigh of relief. The Labour Party, precisely because it realised that Corbyn might be contemplating the kind of pivot described above, has risen in arms to preserve its essential City connection. What will ...”