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“... reported, ‘but not very much in German.’ He worked with the utter absorption that would always mark his greatest periods of self-discovery, and not for the first time Dorothy worried that the strain of making verses was making him ill. Wordsworth was writing with troubled urgency, as though his poems were a necessary psychological bulwark: ‘As I have had ...”

“... we are, much more visible than our ancestors. The megaliths near Abu Simbel, the stones aligned to mark the moonrise and moonset at Stonehenge, the 5000-year-old stone circle at Callanish on the Isle of Lewis: they all appear to describe the extent of our capacity for wonder, the full midsummer Moon at the Callanish stones in certain years appearing ‘to skim ...”

“... Saving God and Surviving Death: Mark Johnston has gone for the double, and I’m tempted to think he has succeeded, on his own terms, many of which seem about as good as terms get in this strange part of the park. I don’t, however, agree with his reasons or share his motive for attempting to explain how we can survive death, and I doubt the necessity of some of the matériel in his admittedly fabulous argumentative armamentarium ...”

“... last year in your garden,/Has it begun to sprout? Will it bloom this year?/Or has the sudden frost disturbed its bed?’; ‘And you wait for a knock and the turning of a lock for you know the hangman’s waiting for you/And perhaps you’re alive/And perhaps you’re dead/Hoo ha ha/Hoo ha ha/Hoo.’ The tight grip that Valerie (who died in 2012) kept on ...”

“... too, and it’s hardly surprising that he should have been a rereader of The Idiot. It is a mark of his poetry that it frets in all childishness, praising and blaming, over the actions and reputations of the great, while managing to make people feel that it is itself the work of a great man, however bashful, stumbling and dishevelled. It is the work of ...”

“... didn’t like attending County Hall,’ ‘The first person I was in love with was called Mark Lyle’ – all these sentences could have been written by the same person, the person who wrote ‘Frank drops me off outside the sisters’ flat,’ ‘You could hear the kids yelling in the pool,’ ‘I could hear kids on the waste ground behind ...”

“... topical preoccupations as another sign of his ‘purposiveness’ (a Wilsonian word), and as a mark of his in-touchness with the real daily world, which was also a good sign. Fleet Street was flattered, for example, that its first editions should be rushed to Number 10 for the Prime Minister’s bedtime reading. When it was said of him that he was really ...”

“... where his own voice takes command and assesses his central figure directly, he is rarely off the mark. Often witty, always clear-eyed, neither waspish not ingratiating, this is a convincing portrait of the artist as a tyrannical child, so bewildered by his own history that his only recourse is to forget it. ‘The master of amnesia,’ Wapshott splendidly ...”

“... it’s a cliché, and Powell’s trick is to pretend to forget. A feigned absence of irony is his mark, a form of deadpan. When he writes of ‘the whole unfortunate Course of subsequent events’, the tame formula swarms with modest promise – it’s as if Buster Keaton had just said, with equal solemnity, that he knows how to fly a kite. What is funny in ...”

“... Two, and to escape arrest he fled to France, accompanied by the Wykehamist gentleman-lawyer John Frost, described by Hitchens as secretary of the London Corresponding Society. The LCS was a society of radical artisans, not a gentleman’s club, and its secretary was in fact the shoemaker Thomas Hardy. The trial proceeded in Paine’s absence, and according ...”

“... who literally pitched his tent on Tate’s lawn. All of these must have responded warmly to Robert Frost’s patriotic poem ‘The Gift Outright’: ours before we were the land’s. She was our land more than a hundred years Before we were her people. She was ours In Massachusetts, in Virginia, But we were England’s, still colonials, Possessing what we ...”

“... who enjoyed a fortuitous éclat as ‘Blackwood’s celebrated Odontist’. If ‘like is an ill mark,’ as a character in the Confessions suggests, it was a mark at which the Blackwood’s group delightedly took aim. But Miller’s ‘likeness’ also has the force of a disclaimer, a warning that some of the things we ...”

“... and liquid ‘l’ sounds (maybe ‘Elsie’?):When the elephant’s-ear in the parkShrivelled in frost,And the leaves on the pathsRan like rats,Your lamp-light fellOn shining pillows,Of sea-shades and sky-shades,Like umbrellas in Java.Here, as Mariani says, ‘every line seem[s] to convey an impression of tea,’ an evocation of winter, early darkness, the ...”

“... to early success, particularly her mentor, Ted Morrison, who got her invited to dinner with Robert Frost (Rich charmed him) and who groomed her for the Yale Younger Poets competition judged by Auden, which she won in 1950. The prize put her on the map. A Change of World, published the following year, garnered respectful reviews; she shone at public ...”

“... the gothic theme, to the same awful convent school that Antonia White attended and wrote about in Frost in May. Vicious nuns, a minimal education for middle-class marriage and – something, at least – a powerful enemy to kick against. As an adult she would spit on the street if she saw nuns. Earlier, she had a more sophisticated mode of ...”