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“... Welsh and American verse as ‘English’. Since the appearance of these anthologies, no other major British publisher has challenged their dominance.What does Clare Bucknell mean by ‘British culture’? The first chapter of The Treasuries: Poetry Anthologies and the Making of British Culture covers a four-volume series of anthologies, Poems on Affairs ...”

“... into terrible atrocities. My Lai happened because officers failed.’ Another Marine, Captain John McNamara, wrote home in 1967 that he was appalled by the loose talk he heard among his fellow officers about the need to employ terrorist tactics against terrorists: ‘Just a few years ago it was confined to the fringe. If the actual [US ...”

“... that British new music – equally suspicious of European modernism and anything American, whether John Cage or Janis Joplin – wasn’t a club worth joining. Although he had no desire to take up 12-tone composition techniques, Arnold Schoenberg’s music appealed to him intellectually and he engaged with it seriously – in noticeable contrast to Vaughan ...”

“... posthumous miracles had begun to be attributed to him, and he was officially canonised by Pope John XXII in 1320. The story, in outline, runs thus. On the morning of (probably) 26 November 1290, Cragh and Trahaearn ap Hywel, a fellow rebel, were led out from their prison in the de Briouze castle of Swansea to the place of execution, on rising ground ...”

“... complexity of the mathematics involved in derivatives can’t be exaggerated. This was the reason John Meriwether, a famous bond trader, employed Myron Scholes – of the Scholes-Black equation – and the man with whom Scholes shared the 1997 Nobel Prize in Economics, Robert Merton, to be directors and co-founders of his new hedge fund Long-Term Capital ...”

“... only a few flying hours away, it may be time to start reflecting on a very different type of tale. John Hu, the Hu in Jonathan Spence’s latest book, was a man without guile, and without luck. He travelled to France from Canton in 1722 as the employee of Jean-François Foucquet, a Jesuit missionary, but behaved in such a bizarre fashion that in 1723 he was ...”

“... John Richardson is one of those gossips who knows – or at least knows about – everyone. For example (on page 118, to be precise), Marie-Laure (1), Maurice Bischoffsheim (2), the Comtesse de Chevigné (3), the Duchesse de Guermantes (4), the Marquis de Sade (5), Jean Cocteau (6), the Vicomte de Noailles (7), an anonymous gym instructor (8), Igor Markevitch (9), Diaghilev (10), Nijinsky (11), Maurice Gendron (12): I was the daughter of 2, an immensely rich Belgian banker, and the granddaughter of 3, who was said to be the model for 4, and was also – would you believe it? – the great-great-granddaughter of 5 ...”

“... older than, or at any rate comes a little after, the mind that did whatever it might be. The major risk for a writer of first-person adolescent novels is that they can easily come to seem like bad creative-writing exercises, in which the divergence between what the narrator sees and what the rest of the world sees becomes the main object of ...”

“... If you are already aware of John Gray (1866-1934), you may well have a particular interest in the 1890s, or in certain aspects of Catholicism.* You may have fleetingly met the name in period biographies – Beardsley’s, Yeats’s, Wilde’s. Wasn’t Gray supposed to be model for ‘Dorian’? Or you may simply have come across an extraordinary poem called ‘The Flying Fish’, which more than anything has roused and tantalised curiosity ...”

“... quagga. This curious form of action at a distance was given a name (telegony) and even inspired a major programme of experimental breeding. As a ‘fact’ it was comfortably embedded in most of the genetic theories of the time (including Darwin’s own) and was only rejected when August Weismann made it impossible in theory – the theory he erected on the ...”

“... also have resulted in the discovery of things to write about Richard Burton. One of Mr Ferris’s major problems, apart from having to work out the always-tricky equation between reputation and rent-money, was that people didn’t really want to talk to him about Richard Burton. This wasn’t just because Richard Burton is so numbingly boring that anything ...”

“... was daringly alluded to by one of the more active covert gays of his time. There was a major release of new material with the grandson Charles Tennyson’s 1949 Life. Now – in the age of the welfare state – the poet’s gloom was traced to his deprived childhood. Charles Tennyson depicted, for the first time, the gothic excesses of the Somersby ...”

“... Spain. And if he pined for his great love Rapún while he was in Argentina in 1933, at least two major ‘infatuations’ in Buenos Aires consoled him. Lorca sometimes felt the need to excuse his good spirits and to reassure listeners that he really had tragic depths: ‘contrary to what people think, I’m not a happy poet but a sad one.’ The ...”

“... varied as between Russia and Germany, on the one hand, and France, on the other. For, of the major movements which developed thereafter in those countries, French Surrealism was formally retrograde, looking back to Symbolism and beyond; German Neue Sachlichkeit set out in effect to stabilise the Modern Movement, using its formal devices for more ...”

“... free to oppose the Government’s devolution schemes for Wales and Scotland. This was the one major policy rebellion of Kinnock’s career. Leading the ‘No’ campaign in Wales, he put at risk many important friendships, particularly in the unions; but his sense of public opinion was vindicated when the referendum in Wales went 4-1 against an ...”