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“... Stella rings from Edinburgh. She was 90 last week and apologises that she hasn’t learned a new Shakespeare sonnet to mark her birthday. However she recites off by heart, and with no mistakes, ‘Shall I compare thee to a summer’s day’ and promises to learn a new poem for when she sees him in the summer.27 March. Fill in the census form to which I add ...”

“... Criticism’ is to incite an understanding which is partial in both senses. The strength of William Empson’s criticism has always been its commitment to principles and not to theory, and this strength is clear in one of his apophthegms, itself a principle about principles: ‘Life involves maintaining oneself between contradictions which can’t be ...”

“... manage the unconscious impulses of Organisation Man, that time-serving drone who – discovered by William Whyte in the Fifties – came fully fitted with the miserable wife, brattish children and off-the-peg infidelities of a Joseph Heller novel that was yet to be written. The creed of excellence has a sun-bleached Californian feel, but it is also tuned into ...”

“... sorrow and fear, creeps out endlessly in all Joyce’s work. He uses the thing, in the same way as Shakespeare does but less formally, to attenuate the fear of those who have belief and who genuinely think that they will be in hell or in heaven shortly, and possibly very shortly. With laughs he palliates the sense of doom that is the heritage of the Irish ...”

“... worked. As he told Sean O’Casey, when rejecting The Silver Tassie for performance at the Abbey, Shakespeare did not fill Hamlet and Lear with his own beliefs, but gave those characters a life that allowed them to educate him. It is crucial, in other words, to triangulate biographical data with the polarities of meaning in the play. Once the Old Man’s son ...”

“... to compare him with another artist, who would it be?’‘It would be Picasso,’ he said. ‘Or Shakespeare, who’s a bit of a poet. People who defined a new movement in their time.’The New York Times ended a few days of self-suppression with a summation of the Trump lobby’s atmospherics. ‘For Donald J. Trump’s most ardent supporters,’ it ...”

“... have these three nights sat up with him from the apprehension of his dying,’ he wrote to William Haslam two days before the end. ‘Dr Clark has prepared me for it – but I shall be but little able to bear it – even this my horrible situation I cannot bear to cease by the loss of him.’Severn meant no harm in packaging those five months with ...”

“... was somehow the cause of the war.’Neiman mentions the so-called Dunning School, named after William Dunning, a professor at Columbia at the turn of the 20th century, who, with his followers, disparaged the efforts made during the Reconstruction to establish the civil and economic rights (forty acres and a mule) of former slaves and gave intellectual ...”

“... Joseph had taken a job at Branch Normal, a school for blacks at which Chester was introduced to Shakespeare and Chaucer. One day, in front of an audience of parents and students, Joseph Jr, the middle son, gave a chemistry presentation: a gunpowder demonstration in which he mixed ground saltpeter, ground charcoal and ground glass. Chester was supposed to ...”

“... some seventy feet at the Great Falls of Paterson. There’s a nice picture of it on the cover of William Carlos Williams’s book-length poem Paterson. The river makes its way through traprock and sandstone to the level plain of the city, continues north to Hawthorne, then doubles back on itself and begins its southerly flow to Newark Bay, about twenty-five ...”

“... then, blow me down, if he didn’t suddenly become Tom Clark objectivist, and start writing like William Carlos Williams. He went back to America and began writing objectivist poems dribbling down the page. I thought this is awful, a talent lost. Things were cropping up all over the place that one didn’t seem to able to do anything to prevent.You had an ...”

“... population growth’. The lead author of both the 2017 and 2019 reports, an ecologist named William Ripple, told Business Insider that ‘if an individual is concerned about climate change, three things to consider include: one, reducing the use of fossil fuels; two, eating mostly a plant-based diet; and three, having fewer ...”

“... go on talking for hours but, alas, I’ve got to fly ... I’m meeting someone at the NFT – the William Wellman retrospective – it’s terribly late and I’ve got the tickets ... ’ Such interruptions as these continued to be a daily occurrence throughout a period of several weeks, during which I was indeed able to think about the memoir at regular ...”

“... against the concealment and silence that the loss of Palestine had imposed, and that his father, William Said, had accepted, leaving behind not only the family’s past in Jerusalem but also his Arab name, Wadie. After 1967, Said embraced the Palestinian struggle – an act of ‘affiliation’, as he put it, a commitment based on belief, rather than ...”

“... The relevant passage was an account of a conversation between Gladstone’s home secretary, Sir William Harcourt, and a police chief. While Clarke was being moved from prison to prison, Harcourt had refused to countenance the idea that he and the others were political prisoners and insisted that they be treated as common felons. (Harcourt generally took a ...”