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“... had been paid. Frost’s mother, Isabelle, took Robert and his sister east from San Francisco to Lawrence, Massachusetts, where they lived initially with her parents-in-law before Isabelle tried – with mixed results – to hold down a job as a teacher. Frost was many things before he was a poet; by the time he married at the age of 21, he’d worked at a ...”

“... procedures. Also about painters he admires (Titian, Rembrandt, Velásquez, Ingres, Matisse, Gwen John) and those he doesn’t: da Vinci (‘Someone should write a book about what a bad painter Leonardo da Vinci was’), Raphael and Picasso. He prefers Chardin to Vermeer, and dismisses Rossetti so violently as to induce pity. He is not just ‘the worst of ...”

“... quality – a little like Weegee’s – at once random and composed. In one, the circus director John Ringling North dominates the right half of the frame, shouting instructions to an unseen person, while above and to the left a high-wire act has two showgirls suspended from the wheels of a bicycle: the picture frame is divided by a balancing bar carried by ...”

“... and felt herself ‘completely at home’ with them. In the person of the ‘gentle and amiable John Aked’ she entered, too, into the first of her intense relationships with working men. The journey to Bacup, though she calls it ‘sentimental’, was also, by her own account, the launching-pad for her lifelong work as a social investigator; as her diary ...”

“... field against particular ideas, like Dickens in Hard Times, that only a few – say, Tolstoy and Lawrence – show an innate angry suspicion of ideas per se, as though the tender living tissue in their care needed protection from the rampaging will to abstraction. Yet even in celebrated victories over specific sets of ideas (Voltaire’s disposal of Leibnitz ...”

“... nature is as much a political metaphor, an instrument for national contestation, as it is for John Clare and Ted Hughes. Critics such as Tom Paulin and Mina Gorji have drawn our attention to the ways in which nature becomes a metaphor for an embattled Englishness in Clare and Hughes; the unfinished ‘naturalness’ of nature is conflated with the ...”

“... at all, but as neurosis, emotional repression, the inability to love: there is much more D.H. Lawrence and Blake in them than there is Mr Marx. And of course a lot of Freud, mostly not in particulars but in the diffusely Freudian cast of mind – the ‘climate of opinion’, in Auden’s famous phrase – which, contemplating the whole range of human ...”

“... Byatt’s mother, Kathleen – drop books into the rubbish bin. I have to think a lot about D.H. Lawrence for some reason; I have to rebut the idea that there are no accidents in novels. It is pertinent, then, that I had no education. Byatt was freed into hers and also enclosed by it. You are inside its sensual pleasures. Yes, you will sometimes feel ...”

“... the outer firth.The bigger and more glamorous yards lay upriver at Dumbarton and Clydebank, where John Brown’s built the Queens for Cunard, and inside Glasgow’s city boundaries, where five or six companies on both banks (among them Harland & Wolff, Fairfield and Barclay Curle) gave Auden his ‘glade of cranes’. Downriver, the engine works and slipways ...”

“... before leaving the town: ‘This is to give notice to all the World that Andrew Tucker and his son John Tucker are Clowns, and Cowards.’ It is his earliest extant manuscript, and is reproduced here along with the portrait of Sarah Andrew. Such episodes, taken from local archives and legal records, are among the best things in the book, though part of the ...”

“... and remembering some of the books they read then. There’s Camus and Sartre, Colin Wilson and Lawrence Durrell – not quite the literary equivalent of flares but inducing something of the same incredulity: ‘Did we really read/ wear these?’ I miss the atlas I really wanted and come away with one or two biographies, including a memoir of David Winn, an ...”

“... sense of how the vast network that linked the battlefield and the home front actually worked. John Bowne of the Washington bureau of the Sanitary Commission, busy with trying to match survivors with bodies at Gettysburg, took on the case of a domestic servant who wrote saying that she thought that she might be not a widow but an abandoned wife and asked ...”

“... ultimate creatures’ he came across in the legends of the North. Clue: it wasn’t D.H. Lawrence.A writer, born around 1890, worked bits of ancient writings into his own massive masterwork, magnificently misprising them as he went. Clue: it wasn’t Pound.J.R.R. Tolkien (1892-1973) spent his working life as a philologist. He was Reader then ...”

“... past, an encyclopedia of forgotten modalities for any postal occasion. ‘When I joined,’ said John Colbert, now the CWU’s communications and campaigns manager, ‘you were in a classroom for two months, learning all the different acronyms. There was a postal instruction for everything. What every label meant. At the end of it you had a sorting test. If ...”