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“... of tea. The other long-standing lady in Larkin’s life (and who stood for a good deal), Monica Jones, remarks that to the Larkins the least expenditure of effort was ‘something heroic’: ‘Mrs Larkin’s home was one in which if you’d cooked lunch you had to lie down afterwards to recover.’ Monica, one feels, was more of a Woolworth’s supervisor ...”

“... had declined to organise any official commemoration of the 150th anniversary in 1969. According to Terry Wyke, a local historian, this was in part an attempt to prevent the local Labour Party from using the occasion as a platform for their own political programme. It wasn’t until Labour regained control of the council that the blue plaque was finally put ...”

“... socialist historical scholarship is beginning to develop inside as well as outside the subject. Terry Eagleton, leader of the younger British Marxist critics, and Williams’s ex-pupil, observed a few years ago that Williams was moving closer to current theoretical Marxism. If there is some rapprochement, it could equally have arisen because more Marxists ...”

“... failed. He ‘discovered’ the 21-year-old Phyllis Walker, née Isley, renamed her ‘Jennifer Jones’, and suggested her as the saintly heroine of The Song of Bernadette. Later, he recast her – as the sultry Pearl Chavez in Duel in the Sun, otherwise ‘Lust in the Dust’. Finally, he married her. Perhaps, behind all the business acumen and concern ...”

“... might just come up with a formula that would satisfy most literary scholars. When F.R. Leavis and Terry Eagleton are both sitting on different coloured clouds in heaven they’ll probably spend the first few millennia with their angelical backs to each other in a cherubic semblance of a huff; but after a few centuries inhaling the harmony-inducing air of the ...”

“... JR, in the 1950s, Green had influential American admirers on both East and West Coasts (Updike and Terry Southern), and his last two novels, Nothing (1950) and Doting (1952), though trim, have roughly the same proportion of speech to narration as Gaddis’s colossal book. Stella, with her manipulative glamour (an ex describes her as needing ‘somebody to lie ...”

“... in ‘The Hotel Normandie Pool’ he is visited by Ovid, a sandalled hotel-guest in a toga made of terry cloth, who speaks comfortingly of exile and the value of art. But Walcott doesn’t take comfort. In the title poem he explores self-accusingly the relationship between travel and betrayal. The speaker is a man who has attained a position of power in a ...”

“... the other, a man haunted by the whole troubled (and unresolved) matter of his older half-brother, Terry Burns. It was Terry who had introduced the young David Jones to Buddhism, Beat poetry, Mingus, and who later slipped or snapped into genuine psychosis, to lead a cruel jacitation of a ...”

“... are more confident still. Shakespeare’s recent biographers Park Honan and Katherine Duncan-Jones take it for granted that the play was his. Andrew Gurr, in editing Richard II, ‘assumes’ that it was, and the same assumption is made by the editors of the Oxford Complete Works of Shakespeare and the editor of the new Arden edition of the play. Leeds ...”

“... over the bodies of your friends. Jarman made a note in his diary in April 1989: ‘Since autumn: Terry, Robert, David, Ken, Paul, Howard. All the brightest and best trampled to death – surely even the Great War brought no more loss into one life in just 12 months, and all this as we made love not war.’ In March 1992: ‘We talked of the people who died ...”