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“... ask any questions. She ate her supper and remarked at one point that the new pop star Ricky Martin looked like a fake. A director who was with us had been the subject of two of her pieces for ‘Talk of the Town’. He later told me he realised at the party that Lillian didn’t think of him as a friend. ‘In a perfectly nice way,’ he said, ‘I had ...”

“... piffle!’). Richard Ellmann’s Oxford Book of American Verse, Michael Holroyd’s Augustus John, Andrew Motion’s The Poetry of Edward Thomas (‘Am I to suppose this is how he talks to his students, poor sods?’). The fame of other writers Grigson takes as an affront: ‘a sudden fashion for Borges, a fashion for Beckett, a fashion for Bunting’. Imagine ...”

“... stayed on for a while as live-in curators. In 1970 a new modernist extension was added, by Leslie Martin and David Owers, to show off more of the work in a larger space with more generous sofas. The latest development – funded by £3.65 million from Arts Council England and £2.32 million from the Heritage Lottery Fund – has involved entirely remodelling ...”

“... of wild animals and I have to be the lion-tamer or be eaten . . .’ ‘Oh, is that so?’ Steve Martin challenges him. ‘You don’t think it’s about a little hurt from Daddy?’ When you want everything, and get everything, maybe the fantasy of having nothing becomes your luxury. In showbusiness, that kind of thinking has always, at the same time, been ...”

“... adviser Nick Seddon, NHS England’s commissioner David Sharp and its mental health director Martin McShane.)The STPs divided England into 44 CCG-run ‘footprint’ areas, all of which were put under pressure to amalgamate hospitals and shrink specialist units. Hospital beds have been progressively cut: the UK’s bed-to-patient ratio is now one of the ...”

“... edition of the poems and then in Thwaite’s Selected Letters of Philip Larkin (1992) and Andrew Motion’s Philip Larkin: A Writer’s Life (1993). In Larkin’s best poems ‘minginess of spirit’ – J.M. Coetzee’s phrase from another context – is either played for laughs or set against the poet’s ‘sun-comprehending’ side. In the life ...”

“... for the Year 1736. The same disdain for technical smoothness is evident in the work included in Martin Battestin’s volume of Fielding’s Occasional Writings, which opens with his earliest extant publication, the hudibrastic satire The Masquerade (1728), continues on to Shamela (knocked out in 1741 from a debtors’ jail), and culminates with the ...”

“... In 1892 A.C. Benson published an essay which introduced the modern appreciation of Andrew Marvell. For more than two hundred years Marvell’s verse had shared with Metaphysical poetry a lowness of esteem which now seems puzzling. As the Cyclopaedia of English Literature explained in 1844, Marvel ‘is better known as a prose writer than a poet, and is still more celebrated as a patriotic member of parliament ...”

“... by the author is small, and carefully chosen to generate the maximum intensity. Motherless Miranda Martin, 19 in 1920, is the daughter of an amiable landowner, an expert in land reclamation who cannot grasp the urgency in any other matter. Miranda’s brother Andrew is an officer in the British Army; and Miranda’s heart is ...”

“... have lost £140 million by the time the contracts closed thirty years down the line. This is what Martin Wolf had in mind when he wrote in the Financial Times in 2011 that selling off the loan book was ‘surely economic illiteracy. The loan book is sure to be most valuable to the state, which has much the lowest cost of funding’ (the government has much ...”

“... of thorns and the headline, ‘He Is Finished’. When he bumped into the magazine’s publisher, Martin Peretz, outside a Provincetown restaurant and Peretz grinned at him, Mailer promptly bopped him on the ...”

“... that state education could not be ‘equal’ if it was also ‘separate’, through a decade of Martin Luther King’s non-violent marches, boycotts and sit-ins against Southern segregation, American Presidents were forced at last to pay serious attention to the African American. If Eisenhower was reluctant and Kennedy visionary, it was Lyndon Johnson who ...”

“... merely the final – essentially unchanged – version of the restless dilettante of Mein Leben. Martin von Amerongen’s book Wagner: A Case-History has a title taken from Nietzsche, but avoids both the sycophancy of ‘Wagner in Bayreuth’ and the bitterness of the philosopher’s later attack on his master. It is a well-written and quick-flowing ...”

“... as difficult as all that. Take ‘A German Requiem’, which, as he explains in an interview with Andrew Motion in a recent issue of Poetry Review, was originally called ‘Elegy’: but the title was changed to help out English readers. Need it have been? The setting is clearly a German city, probably Berlin, the time the late Forties or early Fifties ...”

“... had done. Child’s Play 3 wasn’t the only story offered to provide a context for the killing: Andrew O’Hagan’s Diary in the LRB (11 March 1993), for example, provided a corrective to the point of view that Thompson and Venables were inhuman aberrations; even if the correspondence that followed soon retreated into an altercation about what Just ...”