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“... of Oxbridge voices reviewing an exhibition selected by and posthumously mounted as a tribute to Peter Fuller. The wannabe Oxbridge voice of Giles Auty, art bumbler for the Spectator, declares ‘Peter’ was led by his arguments rather than his eyes. Up speaks real Oxbridge voice, while duly patronising to Auty – not ...”

“... knees in black water, while lantern light flickered as they shovelled the black muck. Rosalind Williams, in her Notes on the Underground, has brilliantly described this mingled feeling of amazement, delight and terror, as it is delineated in Journey to the Centre of the Earth or The Time Machine or Bulwer Lytton’s The Coming Race – a tradition which ...”

“... Wordsworth for most would be impossible. To Shelley he seemed ‘a solemn and unsexual man’ (‘Peter Bell the Third’), and even the revelation early in this century that he had a French girlfriend, and French illegitimate daughter, has not altered the stuffy public image of Victorian Poet Laureate and sage of Rydal Mount. If anything can change this ...”

“... erupts: ‘I won’t have you monopolising the agony market.’ Elsewhere, he cheers up Kenneth Williams, who is ‘low and depressed’, and criticises him on another occasion for possible tactlessness – talking too freely in front of his own mother. Williams is a good character witness: ‘What is heart? If we’re ...”

“... nick of time’ she discovered that he was a con man, a thief, a racketeer – in the employ of Peter Rachman, none other – and already married with children. I learned not to trust people; I learned not to believe what they say but to watch what they do; I learned to suspect that anyone and everyone is capable of ‘living a lie’. I came to believe ...”

“... King’s company – his cause being just and his quarrel honourable,’ says the disguised King; Williams answers, ‘That’s more than we know.’ We sense at once in Henry’s words the fatal element of rhetorical assumption; the King heartily assumes a willingness to die in (his own) company, after which the very modesty of ...”

“... they mean Robert Lowell, or Allen Ginsberg, or the Black Mountain imitators of William Carlos Williams. ‘The Liverpool Poets’ are regarded with a mixture of fear and derision. ‘The ranks of the illiterate raise puerile and rhythmless voices,’ wrote Roy Fuller. ‘Infantile simplicity is all,’ wrote Julian Symons.What no one in the symposium ...”

“... or educational, most grown-ups make only occasional nostalgic excursions into the country of Peter Rabbit, and then only as part of the ritual induction of their children into reading. In contrast, the young have always been efficient rievers of stories from all sources, and have carried off such literary booty as pleased them. Now that children have ...”

“... smart to take proper note of his elders and betters. Commending a recent Prom performance of the Peter Grimes Sea Interludes, a Guardian music critic remarked that the ‘Moonlight’ interlude formed a link with Elgar, whose First Symphony was also played at the concert. At the same time he regretted that the Grimes Passacaglia wasn’t included. Earlier ...”

“... the spirit of optimism. The second part of the novel is told in letters written by Rudolph Leroy Williams, doing six-and-a-half-to-life in a US prison for holding up a liquor store. He writes to father, mother, sister, and the leader of a committee set up to help with his defence. The first letter is dated January 1967, when he has been in prison for six ...”

“... all-powerful poet envisioned by Emerson, who ‘re-attaches things to Nature and the whole’, to Peter Stillman, in Paul Auster’s City of Glass, crazedly attempting to re-create prelapsarian speech. Olson, it is often pointed out, is the first poet to have described himself as ‘Post-Modern’. That was in 1952. Five years before that he published his ...”

“... so they won’t tell about it.’ In publishing these stories Bowles joined Gore Vidal, Tennessee Williams and James Baldwin as one of the pioneers of gay fiction in America. Williams read ‘The Delicate Prey’ while accompanying Bowles to Tangier on the SS Vulcania in December 1948. ‘It was a stormy crossing, and I ...”

“... a lot of talk about ‘talking the language of the new politics’, and I think I heard Shirley Williams refer to the ‘nodes of the new society’. Ian Bradley sees this new society as a post-social democratic society. For him, liberalism is a mystical cult of the individual. Everything that suits his argument, or rather quasi-religious faith, is dragged ...”

“... sentences: While Frederika dozed, Blaise went into the men’s section of the pool house, where Peter had observed his sister, Enid, being made love to by Clay Overbury, now her husband, as well as aide to Senator James Burden Day, whose daughter, Diana, was becoming, more and more, the center of Peter’s ...”

“... dissected by Ken Coates, and treated like a first-year undergraduate’s essay by Professor Peter Townsend. With his publishers bringing its publication forward to catch the crisis, the book might look like a hastily-written manifesto for the alliance of born-again social democrats and ancient political re-treads among whom he may be doomed to ...”