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“... safely on the other side. Apparently Spartan virtue wasn’t dead yet.In the ghost stories of M.R. James, antiquarians are drier than dust: it takes an attack by a centuries-old ghoul to make them break out in a spot of mild tut-tuttery. In reality, they were volatile creatures. A visit to any ancient site but especially Rome – perhaps the greatest mass of ...”

“... villagers called her a moll heron, ‘all legs and wings’. Later, having read Freud and Henry James, she hinted at a ‘restricted’ upbringing, but she found refuge in her surroundings as well as her books. Lark Rise has some excellent descriptions of the Oxfordshire countryside, interrupted from time to time by the voice of young ...”

“... briefly before being swallowed by a moving plot.Poem-novels, or poem-stories, are all about us – James Fenton’s ‘A German Requiem’, Anne Stevenson’s ‘Correspondences’, Blake Morrison’s ‘The Inquisitor’, Motion’s ‘Independence’, the plotty, tessellated pattern of the poems in Carol Rumens’s Direct Dialling, with its East-West love ...”

“... The Conservatives (membership: 149,000) have nothing to compare with this ground operation. Heather explained to me how she had entered into debate with a Tory-leaning voter online, and had succeeded in making her look again at Corbyn: ‘If this is happening 500,000 times,’ she said, spreading her hands to indicate the ramifications. None of them ...”

“... I have been grappling with Pakenham’s book for years. In the early drafts of my novel The Heather Blazing, the protagonist is working on a history of the rebellion, not from the British side, which is what my father’s friend accused Pakenham of having written, but from ‘our’ side, the Irish side. The following passage from Pakenham’s Preface ...”

“... was an authentic product of King Edward’s School in Birmingham, and of the headmastership of James Prince Lee, a future bishop of Manchester and a disciple of Thomas Arnold, whose educational ideals – the strenuous pursuit of knowledge and the cultivation of elevated tone and Christian character – Edward was to perpetuate in his own career. When he ...”

“... been that son of Yorkshire Jimmy Savile who seemed made from marzipan. But not now. No cake for James.7 August, Oxford. To Oxford and the Holywell Music Room where Bodley’s librarian emeritus David Vaisey and I have a conversation about our time at Oxford in the 1950s. David and I were first aware of each other at the scholarship examination in Exeter ...”

“... summit scaled. You may imagine his thoughts before and after as he strode through the gorse and heather. Beckett seems to have had an uncomplicated relationship with his father. In April 1933 he wrote to McGreevy: ‘Lovely walk this morning with Father, who grows old with a very graceful philosophy. Comparing bees & butterflies to elephants & parrots ...”

“... some really significant story – the marriage of Sir Paul McCartney and anti-landmine campaigner Heather Mills, perhaps; a shade less probably, the wedding in St Eugene’s Cathedral, Londonderry, of Gráinne, daughter of Northern Ireland’s Education Minister Martin McGuinness (not yet knighted for his varied public services, but it’s early days), and ...”

“... the same passport round here. There were forty to fifty people. Seven hundred cheered a drunken [James] Dickey some months before. I didn’t go to the reception.McGahern was amused by many things and people. There was no telephone in the house in Leitrim on my first visit (‘I’m uneasy on the phone,’ he wrote in 1998. ‘I think it comes from having to ...”

“... one. Had Her Majesty gone for another duff read, an early George Eliot, say, or a late Henry James, novice reader that she was she might have been put off reading for good and there would be no story to tell. Books, she would have thought, were work. As it was, with this one she soon became engrossed and, passing her bedroom that night clutching his ...”

“... we’re getting some momentum built up.’ I heard about happiness. I heard Lieutenant General James Mattis say that ‘it’s a lot of fun to fight’ in Iraq. I heard him say: ‘You know, it’s a hell of a hoot. I like brawling.’ I heard that Donald Rumsfeld had created his own intelligence agency, the Strategic Support Branch, ‘designed to operate ...”