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“... support to most of the claims being made for ‘narrative poetry today’ – should have told John Haffenden in an interview for Viewpoints that he found Robert Frost’s fable of imagined unlived lives, ‘The Road Not Taken’, exemplary. If Fenton’s distinction between the narrative kinds is just, so is the note of regret and rebellion that he ...”

“... 19th century – a good boy doesn’t throw his footman out of the window. The book is in the John Johnson Collection of Ephemera at the Bodleian, and this scene was pictured, as I recall, taking place in a panelled room – a prefects’ study, perhaps, or a dining club. Boys’ play, then. And although circumstances and contexts change, still ...”

“... the “artistic”’ – as the setting for her new novel? After two collections of droll Angela-Carterish short stories and two brisk, borderline surreal novels, Reversed Forecast (1994) and Small Holdings (1995), came Wide Open (1998), the story of a twinned pair of damaged men, in which she loosened the prose, broadened the scope and heightened the ...”

“... a problem as Heaney’s family grew and grew up. To one of his touchiest correspondents, the poet John Montague, he confessed in 1976: ‘I’m in a furious mess over the housing question. This place is a hellhole because of lack of space … The launderette in Wicklow has closed down, so Marie washes for four of us and herself in the bath.’ The life of the ...”

“... at the finish. Shape gives his books the narrative nonchalance that distinguishes the work of Angela Carter, all those gins and powders and game old boilers. Fabulous bawdy. But there is none of Carter’s subversion, the dangerous sense that the narrative, if you don’t keep your wits about you, will carry you somewhere you’d rather not go. What is ...”

“... by those who have passed by and peered in without ever achieving intimacy with the culture: Angela Carter’s essays of the early 1970s collected in Nothing Sacred; Anthony Thwaite’s delicate and tentative poetry collection, Letter from Tokyo; and John Hersey’s great work of reportage, Hiroshima. When literary ...”

“... run by British nuns, her account of which reads in its girlier moments like something out of Angela Brazil. If having been born ‘astride two classes’ was the unmaking of her as a child, it was the making of her as a writer and as someone who, when the moment came, threw in her lot politically, and ‘instinctively’ one can but add, with the ...”

“... A relief, then, to turn from all this deranged big-talk to some sturdy English self-effacement. John Haffenden is steadily becoming the closest we have to a domestic version of the Mansos and Grobels. He has already published a book of earnest conversations with a dozen or so poets and this month he gives it a companion: Novelists in Interview.2 Plodding ...”

“... he behaves with exactly the vulgarian bluster that one would expect of his ex-wife’s ex-husband. Angela Merkel is really a man. And so on. Not all new tokens of information count as news. Some of the disclosures, however, certainly do, such as the uprating by 15,000 of Iraq Body Count’s estimate of civilian deaths in Iraq since 2003 in the light of ...”

“... different man. This was a pattern she repeated until late middle age. Then she made do on her own. Angela Carter said of Lulu’s men: ‘Desire does not so much transcend its object as ignore it completely in favour of a fantastic recreation of it.’ Given Olivier’s declarations of frigidity and disgust, it’s odd that so many men wanted to fuck ...”

“... that Bush’s delivery is really an impersonation of Ronald Reagan impersonating James Stewart and John Wayne, but I think that elevates him too much: his mentality is clouded with lesser subtleties, occluded with hungers of a more brutal, mercenary, low-budget kind. He has the effective salesman’s knowledge of how to play with people’s sense of what is ...”

“... as a ‘development’. And there’s nothing more fruitful than a timely mutation. The late Angela Carter once told me I was a ‘formalist’. We didn’t meet often, and this may have been the first time we did, in which case it was at a party. It had slipped my mind that I don’t smoke, and I cadged a cigarette off her in exchange for reciting the ...”

“... the difference between ‘beige’ and ‘bone’ at fifty yards that made her a natural diarist. John Updike said her ‘Talk of the Town’ pieces ‘helped put New York back into the New Yorker’. Her first column, in January 1954, was about a careless dry cleaner, and began the dispatches from ‘a rather long-winded lady’ whom the New Yorker heard ...”

“... promptings of her heart among rosy-cheeked girls with aprons crackling against bare skin, like an Angela Brazil tale gone mad. Miss Peabody starts getting drunk and embarrassing other London office-workers. When her mother dies she goes to Australia to meet Diana Hopewell, whom she believes to be an Amazonian, horse-riding sort of woman. But the readers (Miss ...”

“... Peter Christopherson, whom I knew, though not especially well. When I interviewed Rushton (a.k.a. John Balance) in 2000, one of the things that came up was his deep, abiding love for Kate Bush. Actually, it was more like he saw her as some form of household deity or guardian spirit: ‘She’s so hidden … she’s definitely one of the aspects of the ...”