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“... tight-lipped woman who, accompanied/By all she knows of love on leather leash’), Tony Harrison (‘In each of our Blackpool photos from those years/and, I’ll bet, in every family’s South Pier snap’) and Philip Larkin (‘We passed them, grinning and pomaded, girls/In parodies of fashion, heels and veils’) hit the same sweetly rasping note ...”

“... rather than reporting from them, distinguishes his work from that of his fellow Yorkshireman, Tony Harrison. He offers a vivid and witty eyewitness account of the solar eclipse, as seen through his protective glasses, but handles the more tragic stories of 1999 with protective layers of metaphor. In the case of the high school shootings in Colorado, for ...”

“... Field’ (1939) It could have survived perfectly well. Perhaps it did, in John Nash’s (Paul’s younger brother) re-doings of Constable country, or Stanley Spencer’s topographies of Cookham. Landscape painting had always been, essentially and productively, nostalgic: the cult of ruins had mutated, on the whole without pain, into a ...”

“... barn-like structure, set – in 1952 at least – in several acres of woodland. Water Music by John Cage, a Californian composer whose recent work had been feted in New York, opened the programme and baffled its audience. It involved Tudor performing various actions at seemingly random intervals: blowing a duck-call, tuning a radio, shuffling and dealing ...”

“... My story​ will be that John Harvard gave it to me. ‘Who’s that?’ I asked, pointing at a bronze bust in the reading room where I had arrived to give my lecture, and was told that it was the university’s founder, John Harvard. ‘Damn,’ I said. ‘It never even occurred to me that Harvard was a guy ...”

“... It seems to be easier for John Updike to stifle a yawn than to refrain from writing a book. It is generally thought niggardly or envious to complain about a writer’s abundance (a book a year, roughly, in Updike’s case). Most novelists, it is said, would pant to exhibit such a fault. Or the case is made that it is otiose to complain about the mediocre books when there are so many fine ones; the odd truancy in a record of such inspired application is inevitable, the waterfall has its chilly underside and so on ...”

“... is in itself quite an achievement. Instead, we have the admirable poems of Michael Longley, Tony Harrison, and particularly Douglas Dunn, whose Terry Street poems are models of their kind. Equally successful – permanent anthology figures – are Tony Harrison’s Uncle Joe, the stammering printer in ...”

“... but it also suggests the possibility of some psychosexual crisis. We know from the memoirs of John Addington Symonds that boys weren’t likely to leave Harrow sexually innocent, and it could be significant that Trollope destroyed all his youthful journals because he thought they were too revealing. Since his father was bankrupt and he had failed to win a ...”

“... to the Man. There’s comradeship between celebrity dissidents. Sometimes this is practical: Sarah Harrison, Assange’s right-hand woman, flew to Sheremetyevo airport to help navigate Edward Snowden safely and legally into Moscow and get him a residency permit after his leaks broke in the summer of 2013. Sometimes it’s more nebulous: outlaws bond, as we ...”

“... have felt they were able, or not able, to do.In an essay in the exhibition catalogue, Charles Harrison describes one kind of artistic inhibition with reference to Mark Rothko. In 1958 Rothko explained that although he belonged ‘to a generation that was preoccupied with the human figure’, and although it was something he studied, he found ‘with the ...”

“... as well as religion, to the slums. The distinctive Art Nouveau structure was designed by Charles Harrison Townsend, and is dominated by a squat, Romanesque arch, placed, rather eccentrically, off-centre to make way for a modest door that used to lead to the upper galleries. It is clad in glazed terracotta bricks, and the roofline is capped by two book-ending ...”

“... Mrs Fitzgerald described the adolescent Mew’s attachment to her Gower Street headmistress, Lucy Harrison, who had cropped hair, a passion for the work of Alice Meynell and Emily Brontë, and who eventually eloped with another schoolmistress to Yorkshire. Charlotte Mew copied the crop and thrilled to the readings of Alice Meynell’s ‘To a Daisy’. When ...”

“... the promoters of the works included the King and courtiers, but also a local entrepreneur, Sir John Monson, while the largest scheme of all was undertaken by the Earl of Bedford, one of the leaders of the political group self-consciously opposed to other royal policies. Thus the tension appears to have arisen not from a division between court and country ...”

“... for instance, Burns Singer, one of the most original poets of the Fifties, or David Wright and John Heath-Stubbs. All three were friends of Graham, and their inclusion might have helped the Forties and Fifties out of their New Apocalypse v. Movement stand-off. Hamish Henderson, whose 1948 Elegies for the Dead in Cyrenaica (reprinted by Polygon in ...”

“... this stuff of his would never do. Well, I don’t doubt he will do fine as Poet Laureate. Tony Harrison would do fine, too, in this dodgy capacity, which need not, perhaps, be thought altogether obsolete, and comic. Both poets, in their own inward and intractable way, are patriots – and hardly less so than ...”