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“... leaps, arriving for instance at Eliot’s thoughts on farming via the pottery of Bernard Leach and Thomas Hennell’s 1939 drawings of discarded scythes and harrows for H.J. Massingham’s Country Relics. These are threaded together by a historian’s fascination with how the past conceived its own past. How did 1930s sensibilities, from John Betjeman to Cecil ...”

“... erasure through which – by order of the Protestant Duke of Somerset, the lord protector of King Edward VI, who was a minor – the occupants of the St Paul’s charnel house were consigned to symbolic oblivion. If charnels had once served as ‘a kind of waystation for the dead as they made their slow progress from this life to the next’, this ...”

“... activity inflicts. Moreover, in recent years such environmental scientists as Paul Ehrlich, Edward Wilson and, most recently, Gretchen Daily, Harold Mooney and Walter Reid, have spoken out while taking far greater care with details and qualifications than Diamond appears to believe is necessary. The more important reason why Diamond’s rhetoric ...”

“... metaphysical passage, a long poem every bit as wonderstruck and worshipful as John Dee and Edward Kelley when they scried their obsidian mirror, seeking to speak with angels. It begins, ‘Angels hovering all round,’ and then scatters, across nine pages, verses like fluttering cherubim, invocations to each of them:Heiglot,The angel of ...”

“... and almost thirty thousand men sailed for the West Indies under the newly promoted Vice Admiral Edward Vernon, hero of the recent taking of Porto Bello in Panama, to capture other key Spanish possessions in the region. Besides this main effort, a squadron of six warships and two supply vessels, led by Commodore George Anson, was to carry out a secret ...”

“... to remember writing some dark allegorical story.Poems?No. I’d written odd poems, very sub-Dylan Thomas. I remember having or buying Thomas’s Collected Poems. I liked the whole idea of him so anything I wrote sort of resembled him, though I pretended it didn’t.Were you working quite hard in the sixth form for your ...”

“... answer them. Herbert has influenced poets from Henry Vaughan and Richard Crashaw to Dylan Thomas and Geoffrey Hill. And not only poets; reading Herbert has made converts, even in modern times. While reciting ‘Love (III)’, the famous last poem in The Temple, Simone Weil felt that ‘Christ himself descended and took possession of me.’ A recent ...”

“... I thought sadder than anything in Joni Mitchell or Leonard Cohen. I was also interested in Thomas Kinsella’s ‘Another September’, because I knew the house just outside Enniscorthy where it was set and I had met the poet’s wife, whose sleeping figure was evoked in the poem. What was most interesting about it, though, was the way it left the ...”

“... by Irish Dynamiters.’Eighteen months earlier, a young Irishman recently returned from America, Thomas J. Clarke, one of O’Donovan Rossa’s Sancho Panzas, had been arrested in London. Using evidence of an elaborate bomb factory in Birmingham, the Crown charged him and other followers of O’Donovan Rossa with treason. (The plan, it seems, had been to ...”

“... pompous, but I recognised Brooke’s talent at once, and remarked that the epigraph from Sir Thomas Browne – ‘Some Truths seem almost Falsehoods and Some Falsehoods almost Truths’ – contains ‘in a sense justification of all novel-writing’. I knew nothing of Jocelyn Brooke himself, except what was to be gathered from this book. He was, in ...”

“... it was largely won in scholars’ libraries, and it took years to get. The historical critic Edward Said has recently reflected of Eliot and the New Critics, now so widely reviled for conservatism and élitism, that in one respect at least they were populists when they began: they argued that you didn’t need scholarly or philological knowledge, you had ...”

“... elite schools: the progressive Minta gymnasium alone produced Szilárd and his fellow physicists Edward Teller (who rejoiced in the initials E.T.) and Nicholas Kurti, the engineer Theodore von Kármán, and the economists Nicholas Kaldor and Thomas Balogh. They were overwhelmingly Jewish or from a Jewish background. Almost ...”

“... the language of “diversity”’. In 2014, Students for Fair Admissions, a group created by Edward Blum, a conservative lawyer dedicated to eradicating positive racial discrimination, sued Harvard and the University of North Carolina, alleging that, in their zeal to increase their intake of Black and Latino students, the schools had discriminated ...”

“... In his essay on the painter Jack Yeats, which he sent to Beckett in 1938, Thomas McGreevy wrote: ‘During the 20-odd years preceding 1916, Jack Yeats filled a need that had become immediate in Ireland for the first time in 300 years, the need of the people to feel that their own life was being expressed in art.’* Beckett was in Paris when he read the essay ...”

“... with the clouds scudding over the top. We passed into Scotland and saw a sign for Ecclefechan, ‘Thomas Carlyle’s birthplace’ as one of those brown signs reminded us. Karl thought the town might offer the chance of a sandwich. We slipped off the motorway and inched through the ordered trees to the town, which seemed like it had been put to sleep some ...”