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“... endorsed a fellow writer’s lament that ‘you feel bloody well guilty about writing.’ To judge by this new collection of critical essays, he still feels bloody well guilty about it. Indeed, the essays make the difficult relation between art and life – ‘let us put it more melodramatically and call them Song and Suffering’ – their main theme. They ...”

“... me ever since: a hand-typed table of integrals seemingly little different from the ones I’d kept by me as a student. The familiarity of the contents jarred with the table’s front page. Only 31 copies of the table had been printed, the recipients listed on the cover. The table, dated 24 June 1947, had been prepared to accompany a classified report. The ...”

“... disparity up to American exceptionalism, but that’s more a slogan than an explanation. And as David Garland points out in Peculiar Institution: America’s Death Penalty in an Age of Abolition, on this and many other matters of criminal justice, the United States is not so much a single nation as a federation of 50 states, each of which has substantial ...”

“... heart.All I possessed were secret books. Dion´yzy arranged my bedas we both wished. There will be no children, he had said.This is what I swan-sung when I wed: I am marryinghis harp. I died back to life as a child, a bride at fifteen.I heart-sang: ‘The harp is the abyss. I shall never knowthe earth again, not through her notes, not as the notesfrom a ...”

“... of Chile. Solitaries are demagogues and demagogues solitaries. Annual poetry sales, it must be said, never dip, not a unit. Penguins are rarely mentioned for fear of obviousness though the albatross, where encountered, is a symbol for penguins, and the elephant seal a symbol for the albatross. The local note is especially prized on condition that nobody ...”

“... Out by the woodpile at 3 a.m., knock-kneed and shitfaced, lost in your own backyard, you pour a libation that comes straight from the dregs and she drinks it. Or you stand at a sinkful of broken this and that wide-eyed and with nary a hint of what’s next, as she goes by with her Tesco bags and a fifth of gin in her pocket ...”

“... for me.’ Sometimeshe lies down with these rejects. His finger-bones achehe imagines them blacked by a lifelong seepage of ink.Among the crosshatch of deletions one line untouched:She said: ‘This comes not from the scar but from the wound.’With that a shift in her womb: the unnamed child.         She is the girl waiting         at the ...”

“... better to have a government that can pass legislation and take decisions when it needs to than to be stuck with one that stumbles on hand-to-mouth from vote to vote. We seem to prefer certainty to confusion. But why? What evidence is there that majority governments are better at governing? The fundamental long-term problems this country faces ...”

“... After a painting by Jeremy LeGrice … in London, of course you are, landlocked in your kitchen, but just a step, after all, from the door into the hall, and then just a step from the door into the street where the cabbie is more than happy to wait by the slip-road that takes you out through the wrecked hulks of tower blocks, happy to stop- start-stop in the backed- up traffic, its tide-race of tail-lights, its surf of crap and slop, letting you out with a minute or so to spare for the westbound train, a minute or less, so you scarcely believe you’ve done it, except landing-lights in the bare backs of houses are slipping past too fast for counting, while some sudden, clear, cold wind is shaking the fire-escapes like rigging, and that sky-high blur of dark cloud laid on darkness is the test of where you are, of what you’ll come to next, which is why you fall asleep from fear or habit, which is why you wake up with the ghost of kitchen-whiskey, why the first and last shreds of memory hold only the best and worst of what you first intended, as your fist strikes the window, as your foot slaps the platform, putting you just a step, a step or two, from the cliff path and the path that goes from the cliff to the beach, wind ringing your ears almost as much as the cries of seabirds which fast become the birds themselves, afloat on the massive uprush of air that flows from the root of the cliff and up over its lip, which makes you think, ‘Bird’s-eye view: myself just pate and boot and little salt-white hands,’ while you trample out the pith and bladder of seaweed, setting off the unholy stink from its silky, liverish reds, beyond which lies nothing, lies nothing at all, unless it’s the sea that cheats the eye, the sea that gives endless accounts of itself, running green and green-and-white, and a deeper green beneath; you can hear it, can’t you, that low-in-the-throat, that hysterical hiss; you keep your eye on the fault-line, don’t you, where sea and sky squeeze out a line of light; you’ll stay there, won’t you, fronting the weather, learning it all by rote? – Bird’s-eye view: myself almost out of sight, little salt-white… And that deeper green beneath to prompt you ...”

“... the energy system cindering softly under us, slow-cooking the marshlands. ‘The gate ought to be here. The map said so. That map back at my flat . . . Look, there’s a spot somewhere this way where sheep shove through. See those fieldfares and redwings? They landed last night.’ Then a step within a fence nobody bothered with for years or knew, except ...”

“... a seasoned hack with no illusions about how the media work. He chose Tom Baldwin of the Times, by all accounts about as unillusioned as they get. I assume the point of hiring Baldwin was to have a News International insider who could mix it with the likes of Andy Coulson, although that’s an idea Miliband is doing his best to bury at the moment. At the ...”

“... the membership. In 2007, Lib Dem members chose Nick Clegg over Chris Huhne as their leader by the narrowest of margins. Given that Huhne was to end up in jail in 2013 you might think this was the wise choice. But none of the voters (bar two) could have known Huhne’s vulnerability on that score. By choosing Clegg ...”

“... William Fiennes has a deep-seated sense of home and what it means to be distant from it. Birth-house, parents, migrant birds: these fuse in his passage on swifts, for example, which ‘come back each year, in the last week of May’ to his old home somewhere in the south country – a fact which interested me, because I have recorded their arrival since the 1950s in Aberdeen on 11 May and in Cumbria on 6 May ...”

“... less than wholehearted. Yet the temptation to romanticise this piece of the past persists, aided by the fact that exile is a word whose charge has been somewhat blunted by an inclination to celebrate the positive aspects of rootlessness, whether as a gesture against the perceived intellectual and personal constraints which ...”

“... far as Yates is concerned. Lin’s previous novel was called Eeeee Eee Eeee, after the sound made by dolphins. The dolphins in Eeeee Eee Eeee also speak English, live underground and club the actor Elijah Wood to death. But given the difficulty that the book’s characters (even the human ones) have in communicating with each other, a non-verbal sound – a ...”