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“... Thoughtful as always about how to win friends and influence people, Geoffrey Grigson in his latest book of poems congratulates himself that his elderly eyes If they remain alert Do the more easily recognise Squirming in his primal dirt Another verse-reviewing squirt. Well, it is nice to know where we stand, and after that rousing salute the most scrupulous reviewer need not be afraid of disturbing cultural harmony or bruising the petals of a sensitive plant ...”

“... important. Liberty means independence, and that means not having to depend on others. (Some of our best pleasures may come from dependencies. The state’s concern is only that we should not have them forced upon us.) It’s a conception that brings together what liberal political philosophers have more usually tended to see as ‘two disparate conceptual ...”

“... Family – a book which, like all those in which Young has had a hand, includes some of the best sociological writing there is – was that, in the long march of rising private prosperity, the ranks at the back were increasingly happy and those at the front, pace Hirsch and other self-described but resentful realists, were not very visibly ...”

“... for weeks on end, and eventually poisoned himself. Elisabeth, determined as always to put the best face on things, denied suicide and decided that she had to return to Germany to raise more cash – to provide an excuse for the increasingly desperate colonists, she asked her mother to send a telegram to say that the ailing Nietzsche needed her at ...”

“... at the moment it’s Ron or Lee, men of awesome reputation in the land, who presently has the best list. It didn’t matter to the three thousand or so who crowded into a Tesco’s car park in suburban Kent to see the Western Palaearctic’s first Golden-Winged Warbler that that was where ‘nature’ was: to the twitchers, nature is an abstract space in ...”

“... There was also a flourishing provincial press, which good judges at the time reckoned perhaps the best papers in the country. The Yorkshire Post, the Scotsman, the Glasgow Herald, the Birmingham Post and, in a special position of repute and influence, the Manchester Guardian, yielded nothing in self-esteem to the London papers, although most of them had a ...”

“... larger and more battle-hardened, and Napoleon was an outstanding military leader. Undoubtedly the best strategy was to retreat indefinitely, avoiding major battles and making use of Russia’s space and (eventually) its severe climate to wear the French down. Yet no one was prepared to state this openly, since the sacrifices entailed by such a policy were ...”

“... as a fighter pilot on National Service in the early 1950s, he was told that he was best suited to flying at night: in daylight he was too often distracted by the view.) He lectured across the faculties in Cambridge in the late 1960s and the 1970s, sat on several official commissions, and wrote continually on whichever issues in philosophy and ...”

“... mind to call his latest novel ‘Love at the Top’. The hero is Tim Harnforth, a 56-year-old best-selling novelist and man of letters. Originally from the West Riding, he is now one of the gens du monde, ‘a high-flyer, a metropolitan man’, literary-lioning it in London. Young admirers come up to him in pubs and say: ‘Mr Harnforth? Mr Tim ...”

“... In the noisy polemical atmosphere of contemporary literary criticism, Geoffrey Strickland’s quiet ‘thoughts on how we read’ may not have got a fair hearing. His book is an answer to the philosophical critics who have lately been questioning the assumption that literary and other texts have determinate meanings, meanings more or less under the control of their authors ...”

“... worse. For the non-selling author can always blame his publisher, or his distributors; whereas the best-selling author, weeping all the way to the bank, has no one to blame but himself. If he is in earnest – and if he isn’t we’ll not bother with him, any more than David Trotter does – he thought that he was testing his society by moving out to the ...”

“... Geoffrey Hill the poet is often washing his hands. Sensuous but deeply penitential, his poetry visits waves of scruple upon itself. No contemporary poet has a more contrite ear for the confessions, and the betrayals, of words. Of course, much great poetry has not worn this bent gesture, nor do we always want it to, and it can be irritating when Hill’s more pious admirers speak as if verse’s highest theme should be not the intolerable wrestle with words, but, as it were, a further wrestle with the wrestle ...”

“... his subject in vacuo. It is the great strength of both Ian Christie’s Wars and Revolutions and Geoffrey Holmes’s discussion of the Augustan professions that they each, in their different ways, avoid any such insularity of approach. Christie’s book is a sophisticated, wide-ranging and lucidly written text, one of the ...”

“... more recent critics have been tending to do. Of the books under review, both Laura Curtis’s and Geoffrey Sill’s offer an ethical rather than a socio-economic interpretation of the novel. Geoffrey Sill’s chapter on Robinson Crusoe strikes me as distinctly the weakest part of what is in some respects a very stimulating ...”

“... straight or that one has the necessary stamina to keep the job, but it is a prerequisite.’) Geoffrey Grigson, so much older than Gunn (he is 77), has of course built his career about being considered impertinent, so it’s not surprising to find in his latest collection (his first was in 1939) runovers like these: So mud was on you that day. So it was ...”