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“... Hotel in Coral Gables, Florida is enormous. So is its pool, which you could say is more of a lake. When Madonna stayed there in the early 1990s, she apparently insisted on having the pool to herself, less for the swimming perhaps, and more because as a material goddess she could. I went to a book party at the hotel years ago (the American Booksellers ...”

“... and to pluck. Consider this delicious morsel of anonymity, ‘On a Lady Sleeping’, plucked by Peter Davidson from BL MS Add. 25,707: Calmely as the mornings soft teares shedd Upon some rose or Violet bedd May your slumbers fall upon you All your thoughts sit easy on you Gently rocking heart and eyes With their tuneful Lullabyes There are no firm ...”

“... smell’; they would end up, he said, in hell, in ‘a stinking dungeon’ and a ‘loathsome lake that burns with fire and brimstone for ever’.For the well to do, the usual way of dealing with body odour was to conceal it under one of several available perfumes. In the 16th century the most fashionable were musk, a strong-smelling substance secreted by ...”

“... not been known to come up so far, as they can’t negotiate the waterfall and the weir before the lake. 21 January. Working in the BBC Studio at Maida Vale I don’t watch President Obama’s inauguration and am astonished when I see on the news in the evening the vast concourse of people gathered in Washington. I don’t read any official estimates of the ...”

“... Birrell didn’t listen, but Bevin persuaded the city council to put men to work constructing a lake in Eastville Park, known for years afterwards as ‘Bevin’s Lake’. In 1917, sitting on a committee to plan postwar reconstruction, he fiercely opposed any return to the gold standard. After the war, again unlike ...”

“... concerned.’ If the treatment of subject-matter is every-thing, we should not be too worried when Peter Porter tells us, referring to his family, that they are ‘quite without distinction’. In this, he is at one with Elizabeth Bishop and Tony Harrison, the former a great poet. However, like Elizabeth Bishop, Porter feels the immediate force of Lowell’s ...”

“... is naked. Her nakedness assaults him with a sudden glowing shudder, a gust of wind across a placid lake. He says nothing, but with a jolt his breath rushes into his blood, filling it with pearls of pure, quivering bubbles, a gushing froth, just as the blood of men shot in the lungs leaves them lying yellow and silent like corpses, while the blood spurts ...”

“... the past, guarded exchanges of confidence. The parents are persuaded to come on a trip to the lake for tea. Daniel and his brother Albert help the old man complete a table that he had undertaken to make for another of his sons. The story then goes back some twenty years to a weekend party at which the whole family was assembled. The sons have come to the ...”

“... and geographic borderlines’. The usual narrative of Surrealism, the curators argue, tends to peter out around 1939, when many European artists were forced to flee the coming war. With pieces from the 1920s to the 1980s, Surrealism beyond Borders blows right past this date, with the implication that, when it comes to such international movements, the ...”

“... she shooed them out of the house: ‘Everybody out,’ she cried, ‘he’s back!’ His son Peter shared Wainwright’s walks when he was a boy. Touching black and white snapshots show him neatly dressed, standing alone in a green trod between limestone walls, dutifully consulting a map. In his fifties he had to retire early, joints swollen with ...”

“... Peter Green’s splendid new translation of Catullus makes quite a substantial volume: more than three hundred pages in all, with an introduction, parallel text in Latin and English, notes, glossary and index. Such treatment doesn’t feel quite right for this ‘new witty booklet, all fresh-polished with abrasive’, as Catullus describes the book he dedicates to Cornelius Nepos in poem 1 ...”

“... people, he said, were responsible for the increase in crime); and Kari Lake, a former newscaster and liberal Buddhist who remade herself as a Maga warrior and was widely hailed as a future party leader.There were, of course, disappointments. Tim Ryan, a working-class populist who ran a strong campaign in red Ohio, lost by 6.6 points ...”

“... Governess in Henry James’s The Turn of the Screw sees her first ghost, that of the wicked valet Peter Quint, the words she uses to describe the event – which initially persuades her that her ‘imagination’ has ‘turned real’, in the person of her handsome employer – are words in which Hamlet is remembered. ‘It was plump, one afternoon, in the ...”

“... the work of art was made. It is as though Wordsworth set about preparing people for trips to the Lake District, and saw the end of his work as being, not the poetry he wrote, and the reader’s response to it, but the feeling the reader would have when confronted with what had made him, Wordsworth, write the poetry in the first place. Irwin gave up his ...”

“... combine to call the New Year in. The snow melts and in London the Thames swells As once the lake lapped Tantalus’s chin, But as I leave the usual filthy train I guess that the embankments took the strain, Or else my book-lined eyrie near St Paul’s Would look down on a city rather like Venice or Amsterdam plus waterfalls Cascading over many a ...”