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“... of the pill or improved facilities indoors. Somebody should commission him, as in the good days of Geoffrey Cannon the Radio Times might have done, to go back and see whether the unexpected renascence of the condom has restored the Putney decorations. The Oxford English Faculty supplies the papers with two very different sorts of reviewer – the ubiquitous ...”

“... and droll charm into a famously smart set. He spent Betjemann’s money, loathed his tutor, C.S. Lewis: ‘What’s wrong with you, Betjeman, is that you’ve no starl. No sense of starl.’ He was taken up by Maurice Bowra, and through him grew friendly with Kenneth Clark, John Sparrow, Henry Yorke, Alan Pryce-Jones, Osbert Lancaster, Robert Byron, Anthony ...”

“... names of contemporaries blend with those of the past. The result is piquant. It is odd to think of Geoffrey Elton, Hugh Trevor-Roper and Lewis Namier as one thinks of Edward Freeman, Samuel Gardner and Edward Gibbon, humanised and distanced at the same time. Vanity and virtue, foolishness and brilliance rub shoulders. One ...”

“... of conflict. (The character of Ryman, Foden notes in an afterword, draws on the real-life Lewis Fry Richardson, a relation by marriage of Foden’s father-in-law.) Meadows is supposed to wheedle information about the number out of Ryman; but, by his own account an ‘inward, unreflexive creature’, he is singularly unqualified for the job. Foden ...”

“... the poems are donnishly based on literary jokes like these, and probably the best in the book is a Geoffrey Hill parody which pictures Hill playing tennis against his devoted admirer Martin Dodsworth: Who crouches at the net, his mouth compressed Severely to a little Gothic slit? On the whole, though, the book falls well short of its pre-match billing. Most ...”

“... the latter thanking him. ‘Fuck Wain and the prig in the Times who was probably Griggers’ – Geoffrey Grigson, another in his rogues’ gallery. ‘I’ve gone away to escape further blows.’ His publisher hoped to steer Betjeman back to architecture, but despite the rollcall of topics Murray reminded him that they had discussed – ‘Street, Norman ...”

“... we do evil we at least are human. Kermode prefers the irrational hatreds and disgusts of Wyndham Lewis to the sober rationalisations of Lewis’s interpreters who ‘smooth him out’ into a principled critic of an unruly age. But he prefers even more the sacrificial transgressions of forbidden love. He sees in Christopher ...”

“... it quickly came to be known. But the Cold War changed everything, and at a public enquiry in 1948 Lewis Silkin, Minister of Town and Country Planning, announced that the Government had no choice but to declare the evacuation permanent. Mr Ralph Bond, who had formed and commanded the Tyneham Home Guard among his own villagers in 1940, was bought out. Those of ...”

“... Motion, Derek Mahon, Fleur Adcock, Carol Rumens, Medbh McGuckian, Penelope Shuttle and others. Geoffrey Hill, Dannie Abse, Denise Levertov, Peter Red-grove, U.A. Fanthorpe, Gillian Clarke, Eiléan Ní Chuilleanáin, Elaine Feinstein are all variously represented, opening out the Sixties, Seventies and Eighties as a time of diversity and imaginative ...”

“... has more Nobel laureates per capita than anywhere else in the world. The other winner was Arthur Lewis, who took the economics prize in 1979. Walcott won his in 1992. By happy coincidence they share a birthday and the government makes a fuss of its favoured children with a Nobel Laureate Week each January. Asked my business at the airport on my way to record ...”

“... his first subject and first wife in Vienna, his third wife in Hungary, and close friends (notably Lewis Namier and Michael Karolyi) among émigré intellectuals and political refugees. His later ‘plain man’ affectations notwithstanding, he was multilingual, well-travelled and knowledgeable about European music, architecture and wine. Wrigley brings out ...”

“... a few feet along from the ex-archbishop of Canterbury. Still, at least he’s not the dreadful Geoffrey Fisher who when I was young was for years synonymous with the office. R. has insisted that I keep sitting down for most of the service, which I do, the proceedings quite slow and choral and upstanding, the only time I feel I have to get to my feet, out ...”

“... a 20th-century construction, put forward especially strongly in the 1960s and 1970s, in books like Geoffrey Ashe’s The Quest for Arthur’s Britain (1968) and John Morris’s The Age of Arthur (1973). Professional historians have long been embarrassed by the whole thing, but the image created – Roman cavalry leader rallies the British after the Roman army ...”

“... Three months later Wallace was arrested, found guilty of the manslaughter of his friend Jonathan Lewis, and bundled off to jail – whence he only emerged in December 1986. As Foot persuasively argues, there were many oddities in the way the Sussex Police made their case against Wallace. In particular, they mysteriously ignored the evidence of a barmaid who ...”

“... British Modernists – Vanessa Bell, Frederick and Jessie Etchells, himself, Duncan Grant, Wyndham Lewis, Helen Saunders and some others – at the Galerie Barbazanges in Paris, which was located on the ground floor of Poiret’s imposing residence at 109 rue Faubourg St-Honoré, next door to the Martine interior design workshop which served as the model for ...”