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“... said to that?’ We know the answer: ‘Not the same thing a bit!’ Another minister of religion, George MacDonald, obliquely got to grips in his fiction with certain doctrinal problems which agitated him, and ended by supplying for his readers a good dose of ‘spiritual nourishment’, even if he couldn’t tell the difference between his grandmother and ...”

“... presence; at its most extreme, they serve as pretexts for bravura display ... The poems written by Craig Raine (in whom the Larkin-Hughes-Heaney canon extended itself in the late Seventies) are the appropriate illustrations of this argument. Craig Raine may justly complain that he has been convicted without trial. But his ...”

“... even reach the car door handles. We got their names soon enough – Tony Tucker, Patrick Tate and Craig Rolfe – but who were they? They were businessmen. Drugs was their business. And they were Faces, ‘Face’ being the word which, in the criminal world, denotes a successful, known professional. They had discovered, as had other unsuccessful businessmen ...”

“... of poetry. Martianism had nothing to do with Mars, everything to do with home, the place where Craig Raine (like Murray or Dunn) feels richest. Surely Martianism comes from the ‘Ithaca’ section of Ulysses, the quintessence of home seen from abroad. Home can be a bit smug, though; and sometimes constricting. The poetic celebrants of home at the moment ...”

“... compromise didn’t attract any criticism from Perry, his abolitionist allies (Henry Kissinger, George Shultz, Sam Nunn), or, indeed, from any prominent figure in the nonproliferation complex. One might have assumed that one of them would have publicly condemned the move, yet there was barely a peep. This could be because the complex has no problem with ...”

“... blue pencil hurt only to heal. The LRB’s taste for poetry is a sure sign of its ear for prose. Craig Raine is represented in this selection by a poem of his own and another by David Lodge, who parodies the Martian approach so successfully that you wonder if it has quite enough to it. Blake Morrison’s ‘Xerox’ is a poem to be memorised now if you did ...”

“... of Philip Larkin’s Letters: the book’s back pages are going to be well-thumbed. ‘Hi, Craig,’ see page 752, you ‘mad sod’; ‘Hi, John,’ see page 563, you ‘arse-faced trendy’; ‘Hi, David,’ see page 266, you ‘deaf cunt’, and so on. Less succinct salutations will be discovered by the likes of Donald Davie (‘droning out his ...”

“... The right to offshore drilling for oil, which Democrats had held back for eight years under George W. Bush, was granted by Obama without a word of contest. The coal industry, too, doubtless will be accommodated as a prelude to cap-and-trade bargaining, but the recent mining disaster in West Virginia has rendered an early statement inadvisable. Once ...”

“... imperialism.But the apparently monolithic nature of Chinese art needs itself to be deconstructed. Craig Clunas’s Chinese Painting and Its Audiences, published earlier this year, and first given as the A.W. Mellon lectures at the National Gallery in Washington, addresses some of the limited and misleading way in which these works have been defined over the ...”

“... women. Elliot’s casual, meandering tone chillingly suggests the tedium of this mini-Holocaust. Craig Raine’s 1953 is a very free and ingenious version of Racine’s Andromaque. Raine transposes the play to the imaginary aftermath of a World War Two won by the Germans and their allies. Pyrrhus becomes Vittorio, the son of Mussolini, and Andromaque becomes ...”

“... into a landscape of privet hedges, crazy paving and hanging baskets, he was one of three sons of George and Mabel Strong. George was a travelling salesman selling hats along the south coast for the firm of Ayres & Smith. He had served in the First World War, and the outbreak of the Second all but ruined him when Ayres ...”

“... A tall, gaunt figure, with a lividly scarred cheekbone and glittering, oddly skewed eyes, A.B. Craig bore a disconcerting resemblance to the bird of prey that punningly adorned the school coat of arms. Along with his twin brother, whose name we could see high up on the roll of honour, Craig had fought at the ...”

“... pitches and with different timbres, this refrain has been part of the Joe McCarthy movement, the George Wallace campaign and every Republican surge from Nixon to Gingrich. (But let’s not be too partisan about it; the rhetoric evolved from the days when the Ku Klux Klan and the Southern Democratic Party were each other’s official and provisional ...”

“... official censors and the press. In Britain an Ibsen campaign was started by an unlikely pair, George Bernard Shaw and the aspiring writer William Archer, who also became Ibsen’s first English translator. Shaw’s pamphlet, The Quintessence of Ibsenism, makes Ibsen into a Norwegian Shaw, intent on shocking Britain out of its Victorian wits. Shaw liked ...”

“... came out, expensively illustrated by Lucian Freud. He got married to a woman called Priscilla Craig, whom he adored, they had a daughter, and his prosperous-looking figure in its well-cut suit stood out amid the squalor of Tambimuttu’s Poetry London offices. But in 1948 it all began to collapse. Priscilla left him, taking their daughter with her, and ...”