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“... The Grapes of Wrath is an appallingly hollow posture of stoicism; The Informer risible; How Green Was My Valley a monstrous slurry of tears and coal dust; Tobacco Road meandering nonsense; Three Godfathers shameless; and The Fugitive inane. Mister Roberts is pious; Gideon boring; The Long Gray Line monotonous. Stagecoach is sometimes cited for its ...”

“... whom he greatly admired. (For example, seeking a stanza form suitable for his elegy on Robert Gregory, he silently adopted that used by Cowley three hundred years earlier in his verses on the death of William Harvey.) On the whole it was probably just as well that Trinity, the Ascendancy college, was barred to him. He often complained of the ...”

“... in 1935: ‘My heart always warms to people who do not come to see me, especially Americans.’ To Robert Bridges there is a judicious criticism of Hopkins (sprung rhythm is not difficult to write well, but Hopkins writes it badly) and he thanks Witter Bynner for admiring ‘my poems even more than I admire them myself’. The show-off element is strong, and ...”

“... in the Dolomites. On the ledge which was now our goal, huge tumps of sea-thrift bulbed out like green brains. As Ed’s silhouette merged with the silhouette of one tump, I saw it as a thought absorbed back into a mind. When I told him this fifteen minutes later, he laughed and said: ‘Oh no! I hoped they were breasts, and I was suckling up to them!’ As ...”

“... there quickly as we could and, you know, everything was very calm and peaceful. England lay like a green carpet below me and the war seemed worlds away. I could see Tunbridge Wells and the sun glinting on the river, and I remembered that last weekend I’d spent there with Celia that summer of ’39.   Suddenly Jerry was coming at me out of a bank of ...”

“... It looks a picture of tranquillity, with a circle of red brick buildings around a village green. The walled compounds contain family houses, barns and stables; there is no way to tell if a house is Serb or Albanian. The dirt road from the village runs down to the Pristina-Pec highway, now controlled by the KLA. In one direction is Kjevo, where Serb ...”

“... confessed a wish to be a singer-songwriter. The boys would cruise around northern Delaware in the green 1972 Caprice Classic convertible their father bought them. Beau’s one youthful flaw was a lack of punctuality. Like his father, he was teetotal, except for a bit of social drinking in his twenties. Hunter was busted for possession of cocaine on the ...”

“... appears under a leather bag, ‘l’oiseau’ under an open corkscrew, ‘la table’ under a green leaf. Only a sponge is properly named (but then the sponge resembles other things too). Despite the psychoanalytic title – La Clef des songes in the (slightly different) original French – this word painting points less to Freud than to Saussure; it ...”

“... itself? The Complete Poems provides a capacious answer. The volumes have been superbly edited by Robert West and run to more than two thousand pages. There were moments when I felt – to borrow a line from one of the late poems – that ‘there’s too damn much of everything.’ But I also found myself wondering why Ammons isn’t read more outside the US ...”

“... is now writing a soon-to-be-bestselling crime novel with plenty of sex and murder. Her husband, Robert, often rudely called ‘Rob’ by unthinking friends, is a highly adapted commuting machine who works in Canary Wharf and times his drive to the station to perfection. She is interesting, he is not. And they have a child, Lanny, who is both interesting and ...”

“... are audibly mapped.There are also thousands of memorable moments, some distinguished by hindsight (Robert Maxwell declaring: ‘I will have left the world a slightly better place by having lived in it’), some by the way radio forefronts every tic, hesitation and obfuscation, and some by personal revelation. In 2020, as Covid added a piquancy to the ...”

“... wrong, you’re facing more than just your opponent. In a match against Korchnoi, Spassky wore a green eyeshade and sat at a distance from the table in order to thwart Korchnoi’s mind-bending rays. During the Reykjavik match, the Russians dismantled Spassky’s chair to find out if it had been tampered with by the Americans. In chess mythology, the ...”

“... without being confined to them. But larger centres have their filmographies too: Marseille in Robert Guédiguian’s movies; Bordeaux in Moderato cantabile, Nice in Baie des anges; Lyon in Melville’s L’Armée des ombres; Lille in Zonca’s La Vie rêvée des anges. In such cases, the location of novels and films is precise and explicit, each accorded ...”

“... of David Cornwell, the former spy who has written under that curious pseudonym since 1961. Robert Harris chose not to proceed, for reasons that are hinted at but not made clear in this book, while in the early 1990s the journalist Graham Lord withdrew under a heavy legal barrage, after circulating an allegedly libellous proposal for his book. ‘I ...”

“... Marthe Bibesco, whom he got to know better. Runciman asked this other princess ‘with huge green eyes … well-suited to the brush of Boldini’ if she would show him Romania and his letter of thanks after that visit strikes a rare note of sincerity and gratitude for ‘three weeks of enjoyment and interest such as I have never experienced ...”