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“... Richard Purdy (‘incapable of psychological insight into sexual matters’) and Michael Millgate (‘prim’), the devoted Hardy scholars who have given us studies of the work, an edition of the letters and several biographies. In an argument never explicitly stated in the book itself, but proclaimed in the press release and summarised on ...”

“... of touch’ (yeah) I am, will lose my seat, SDP wave of the future, usual balls. Actually, little White (Ambassador to Chile) isn’t so bad. A bit guarded, but that’s probably down to the secret FCO biog. which precedes me at all destinations. I am not getting on with his wife though. There is this certain type of woman who simultaneously demands that you ...”

“... Before he enters the sacred area around Mecca, a man dons the ihram, a robe composed of two white sheets – no special dress is prescribed for women pilgrims. The Kaaba in Mecca is an approximately cubical building with a black stone set in silver in one of its corners. The pilgrims circumambulate the Kaaba seven times. Then they run backwards and ...”

“... down being Irish.’ Meantime history went on. ‘Prexy had lunch with Roosevelt on a tray in the White House, 3.2 beer became legal, and a repeal of the Volstead Act was promised ... I feel doubtful about the names of Lenin and Trotsky: when did they enter my consciousness?’ Living miserably with Johnsrud in the vacation from Vassar, Mary was none the less ...”

“... with an African American population living in a tiny ghetto and working in the homes of local white families. I grew up in Long Beach, but by 1968 had moved to the city. My parents, however, still lived there, and my outspoken mother arranged to see the city manager, a non-partisan administrator who exercised the authority normally enjoyed by an elected ...”

“... millennia of ebullient trading and a century of, to put it mildly, muddled planning, Sheppard and Michael Hebbert paint their pictures in the same bright colours: of a healthy, wealthy conurbation, unfathomable, inchoate, yet liveable and boundlessly energetic. London confers prosperity on the rest of Britain rather than drains it away, they say. It is ...”

“... without the other. Those who have both will find that, among contemporaries, Christopher Reid and Michael Hofmann are classified as love poets but Craig Raine and Tony Harrison as blue versifiers. Only a few poets make both, including Seamus Heaney, who has two poems unworthy of him in the Whitworth (one about unfreezing a vaginal pump, one about a ...”

“... themselves, and all these variables may be controlled for effect. There can be art in this, and Michael Fried argues that within Western painting there is a special tradition of realism, stemming at least from Caravaggio (who, he reminds us, painted a Medusa). In such pictures it is not that a shocking effect is due to reality being let in through pictorial ...”

“... on for advice, and when he arrived at the grotto he received a visitation from the Archangel Michael, who ordered him to consecrate a Christian altar on the site. It’s not known what happened to the man with the arrow in his forehead, but the result of his misadventure was the famous Santuario di San Michele. In 999 AD, the Holy Roman Emperor, Otto ...”

“... loves. He is a superb praiser, so it is a pity that he should ever be driven beyond his patience. Michael Hamburger’s poems have always been in the shadows of his translations and critical essays: mainly, I think, because he has acute misgivings about the autonomy of language. He believes in inspiration, that a poet’s words are what ‘some power behind ...”

“... programme for the Eastern Service. The Indian and Sri Lankan contributors are pictured with their white, establishment collaborators T.S. Eliot, George Orwell and William Empson. It’s no wonder that Portland Place seemed the world’s omphalos. Sandhu also describes less bookish figures. There is his sketch, for instance, of the odd career of ...”

“... been reissued as rather grand paperbacks, along with an eighth, a final hardback selection made by Michael Bloch. They all have titles like Ancestral Voices, Caves of Ice, Through Wood and Dale, Midway on the Waves and Prophesying Peace, and it will not escape the notice of the literate public that they are all derived, one with a bit of a spin on it, from ...”

“... for the false teeth she preferred not to wear. An oval mirror hung on a chain and a black and white photograph was pressed into the frame. It was of her husband, Michael, dead for 35 years by then and sorely missed. My education in guilt began there. It was where I first heard the words ‘the bad fire’, a place for ...”

“... apparently on the terms that will do their country most damage. There’s a kind explanation, a white-coated one and a coarse one. The kind account says that they feel democratically obliged to carry out the wishes of the English people, whatever their private opinions. (A variant suggests that they think themselves duty-bound to save the country from the ...”

“... comedies made at Ealing Studios in the late 1940s and early 1950s. Indeed, as Stubbs reminds us, Michael Balcon, the studio’s head in its heyday, was explicit in defining its mission. When Ealing was sold in 1955, he placed a plaque on the studio building that read: ‘Here during a quarter of a century many films were made projecting Britain and the ...”