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“... Holly’s casual attitude towards sex raised eyebrows in 1958. But then this was the time when Allen Ginsberg published Howl, which seems closer to the beast that Connolly was describing than does any fictional creation of Capote’s. If Capote had stopped here, rather than one book later, his claim on our attention would by now have worn thin. But just as ...”

“... nonconformity, his tenderness and outrageous inventions. Hagiographical prefaces to his books by Allen Ginsberg and Robert Creeley align him with Hart Crane and Keats as a poet vulnerable to the world and prone to self-destruction. Wieners himself remembered taking the ferry to Provincetown with Frank O’Hara: ‘We stood again below deck by the hectic ...”

“... F.S.L. Lyons, doyen of historians of modern Ireland, when faced 27 years ago with a short life of Charles Stewart Parnell which took implicit but cheeky issue with his own magnum opus on the Chief. The young Bew – Belfast-born and a graduate of People’s Democracy marches as well as of the Cambridge history faculty – had already published a radical ...”

“... concept’ film, the highest-earning of which were the Lethal Weapon and Die Hard series. As Charles Fleming describes them, in his biography of the epically self-destructive Simpson: These were aggressive, profane, noisy movies in which the audience was asked to witness scenes of graphic physical violence interspersed with moments of ...”

“... Larry Ellison, Alphabet’s Sergey Brin and his former colleague Eric Schmidt. Microsoft’s Paul Allen owned one, as does Charles Simonyi. The tech-bros have grown their businesses courtesy of handsome government contracts and lavish state subsidies, so their superyachts are paid for not just by the labour of those who ...”

“... Communist Party allegedly referred to such techniques as hsi nao, ‘washing the brain’.In 1951, Allen Dulles, a former OSS officer, was appointed the CIA’s deputy director for plans. Dulles, who was convinced that the future would belong to the world power that could master the new ‘brainwashing’ technologies, was instrumental in shifting the ...”

“... of the sonnets was given the pseudonym ‘Lise’. As editor of the Collected Poems, 1937-1971, Charles Thornbury has decided to follow the final 1947 version, thus restoring Lise’s real name and the sequence’s original title, ‘Sonnets to Chris’. (He has, though, retained the sonnets written in 1966 to round the sequence off, adding two – 115 and ...”

“... description of Hensleigh’s other sons as ‘listless layabouts’. Even Hensleigh Wedgwood and Charles Darwin, who at least had high intelligence to recommend them, suffered the ‘Wedgwood-Darwin cult of unhealth’ in a mild form, but they could not compete with the real experts in the family. Henrietta Darwin was ‘always going away to rest, in case ...”

“... of a master mariner, and they had nine children between 1855 and 1870. The fifth was called Charles and the sixth Edward (lots of Greenes were). Charles became a schoolmaster, eventually the headmaster of the public school in Berkhamsted. He married his first cousin Marion Greene, and between 1896 and 1914 they ...”

“... liaison in a sort of perverse fashion,’ he claims. One letter he writes in the persona of ‘Charles Bovary’. ‘What does your name stand for, Dick?’ he writes in another, with the sign-off, ‘Here is mine.’ The letters might make an interesting art piece, he proposes – ‘a Calle Art piece. You know, like Sophie Calle?’ They could paste the ...”

“... very different kinds of poet too: Robert Graves, Dylan Thomas, Octavio Paz, Louis Zukofsky and Charles Olson. As did any number of critics: Edmund Wilson, Harry Levin, Jacques Barzun, Lionel Trilling, Guy Davenport. Were all of them hornswoggled, taken in by the surface polish and acrobatics of Cummings’s style and, those who knew him, by his great ...”

“... Delaney [sic], Emanuel Ford, William Godwin, Richard Graves, Robert Greene, Robert Henryson, Charles Johnstone, Charles Lever, M.G. Lewis, Thomas Lodge, Henry MacKenzie [sic], Thomas Malory, Charles Maturin, Walter Scott, Philip Sidney, Horace Walpole ... twenty, plus the recognised ...”

“... the Michigan prison system. He claims to have killed again on the day of his release. (Lucas and Charles Manson, incidentally, were both made to attend their first day at school dressed as girls.) To read up on serial murders is to sup full of horrors, and also to sup full of explanations. ‘Psychopathic dissociation’, acute, chronic and paranoid ...”

“... and exact knowledge of Eliot is in some ways less advanced here than in, say, the collection which Allen Tate edited and which Ackroyd draws on, T.S. Eliot: The Man and His Work (1967). For the contributors to that volume, among them Stephen Spender, Herbert Read and Bonamy Dobrée, were all allowed to quote from Eliot’s correspondence. Compare Ackroyd with ...”

“... Saba translated by Derek Mahon, Ungaretti by Patrick Creagh, Maria Luisa Spaziani by Beverly Allen. But many others are more limited. In Biographia Literaria Coleridge illustrates the workings of metaphor with some made-up lines which do not pretend to be poetry but nonetheless go through poetical motions: they are ‘an illustration’ but not ‘an ...”