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“... weighing down, even interleaving, curving plaster forms with less tractable materials – stone, wood, rubber – as a way of suggesting the sometimes painful play between hard and soft.If this opposition was one of Bartuszová’s favourite effects, it’s far from the only one she sought. Breakage, bondage, eggs, seeds, vulvas: these forms all figure in ...”

“... and lucid, but handicapped by a resolutely 20th-century sense of politics and meaning. The Emperor Charles V is ‘like a provincial English scholarship boy who’s absorbed into the London establishment’, and ‘the history of the Netherlands in the 16th century has a remarkably familiar ring to anyone reading about it today … However much allowance you ...”

“... of individual poems by Elizabeth Bishop, Paul Blackburn, Denise Levertov, Muriel Rukeyser and Charles Tomlinson. In the notes Weinberger has glossed allusions, and brought together, as my quotations have suggested, an illuminating set of comments by Paz himself. Paz’s recurring references are to Baudelaire and Nerval, but his work is often close to that ...”

“... perspectivist and occasional architect Raymond Myerscough Walker living in a vagabond caravan in a wood near Chichester, his archive stored in his car, a near sunken Rover. Such persons are much more than also-rans. They are the substance of a parallel history of Stamp’s creation that abjures inflated reputations, vapid self-promoters and the slimy gibberish ...”

“... humourless para-political thrillers of espionage as Monimbo (copyright Mossgrave Partnership) or Charles McCarry’s The Last Supper – so ambitiously titled but with all the human interest of a computer or a ventriloquist’s dummy. Charles McCarry must not be confused with Edgar Bergen’s famous doll, Charlie ...”

“... Eight-Four and The Lord of the Rings. Two pieces, an admirable discussion of the novels of Charles Williams and a slightly odd ‘Panegyric for Dorothy L. Sayers’, are printed for the first time. Near the conclusion of the essay on Williams, he expresses himself as ‘horribly afraid’ that he may have given the impression that Wiliams was a ...”

“... Charles Doyle’s biography of Richard Aldington opens so readily at the 24 excellent photographs with which the book is illustrated that the temptation to look at them, before one gets involved with the text, is irresistible. The series starts with a rather determined-looking boy with cap and striped jersey, holding a football ...”

“... or bad, clever or stupid? Stendhal asks himself in the summer of 1832 is the opening of a poem by Charles Boyle. Wet from the shower    towelling your breasts you ask me if I’ve read    Motley’s Rise of the Dutch Republic goes Michael Hulse’s poem ‘Fornicating and Reading the Papers’. Meanwhile, Didsbury has ‘The sky is like an entry in ...”

“... of a less formal way of life among the rich. Her first chapter opens with an introduction to wood panelling, explaining how the wood was prepared and carved. She then considers how the invention of plate glass made mirrors available in large sheets (and discusses their cost in relation to that of painting and tapestry ...”

“... around Coppet – perhaps Goethe’s troubling novel The Elective Affinities comes closest. Dennis Wood ends the chapter in which he records the incidents of 1808-9 with the death of Constant’s father in 1812, and an entry in Constant’s diary that followed it: ‘Worked. My father would have been pleased with my book.’ A sad line, since Juste de Constant ...”

“... In the centre of the room there are two skeletons. Charles Byrne, the Irish Giant, faces the front. His skeleton, tainted brown because of the speed and secrecy of its preparation, is seven feet ten inches tall. So towering are the bones, and so impossibly hefty is their accompanying leather boot, that it’s easy to walk past without noticing the adjacent filigree form ...”

“... by the original event; the mutilated skeletons generate no emotion; they could as well be logs of wood. And even in the last century, when the news of distant colonial disasters could take months or even years to filter back to the metropolis, the excitement which was sometimes generated by sacrificial forms of sudden death was more likely to be the result of ...”

“... used for the storage of old tally-sticks, great stacks of obsolete financial records notched on wood. The tallies were ‘entirely useless’, according to the Treasury. Phipps and his colleague Richard Weobley came up with an economical solution: they would send the tallies, two cartloads’ worth of fiscal kindling, as extra fuel for the stoves under the ...”

“... in her day-to-day life, the tension remained palpable many years afterwards. According to Charles Bradlaugh’s daughter, Hypatia, ‘she was the most tactless person I ever knew.’ But even for those who disliked her methods, denied her inspiration and opposed her opinions, there was something about her which compelled admiration. To Nehru, who had ...”

“... the nominal jurisdiction of the Palestinian Authority. Young men distributed dry sticks of olive wood to dip into a barrel of fire. In Arabic and English, white banners proclaimed ‘Jerusalem is also holy for Palestinians’ and ‘History repeats itself: yesterday Nero, today Sharon.’ Torches alight and banners aloft, the marchers sang the anthem of the ...”