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“... looms, nature documentaries have become big business. The last six years have seen a succession of David Attenborough hits: Blue Planet II, Dynasties and Dynasties II, The Green Planet and Frozen Planet II on the BBC; and on Netflix, Our Planet, A Life on Our Planet and Planet Earth II. Attenborough’s most recent ...”

“... courted Putin scarcely less, but with fewer economic trumps in hand. Within Europe itself, the Red-Green government in Berlin, for all its well-advertised generational lack of complexes, never rocked the boat in the way its Christian Democrat predecessor in Bonn had done. Since 1991, in fact, there has been no action to compare with Kohl’s unilateral ...”

“... a distinction between the ‘liberty of the ancients’ and the ‘liberty of the moderns’; T.H. Green spoke of liberty in the ‘positive’ and ‘negative’, and the same antithesis is strongly present in Hayek’s Road to Serfdom – the title page of which quoted Lord Acton saying that ‘few discoveries are more irritating than those which expose the ...”

“... him as ‘quite miserable-looking … so thin, so little, so miserable’. The art critic David Bourdon thought his art collection ‘stank’ and took the view that Warhol was nothing more than ‘a window trimmer and chichi East Side gadabout who hung around with trashy people’. In the world of commercial art, as photography began to overtake ...”

“... the skin. Red Fog has all the modest desperation of the best American pulps, Jim Thompson, David Goodis. Depression literature. Orphan books written to be abandoned. Dream logic without the luxury of revision. Even the cover illustration is pastiche Gold Medal: it doesn’t illustrate anything in the book, but gloats over a top-heavy blonde. There are ...”

“... is a derivative literariness that projects its own tittering onto the subject: the giggling, gray-green roar that fills a gorge (sweet Thames! run softly) old books refer to as the   vale of Tempe ... Eliotic echoes of that calibre belong (sec above) to journalism. For all her reputation as a poet, Clampitt frequently seems ripe for the travel pages of ...”

“... ear for prose. Craig Raine is represented in this selection by a poem of his own and another by David Lodge, who parodies the Martian approach so successfully that you wonder if it has quite enough to it. Blake Morrison’s ‘Xerox’ is a poem to be memorised now if you did not cut it out of the paper and keep it, but he already had a reputation so anyone ...”

“... movement, but seeming almost a normal aspect of the modern scene, like the ‘magic realism’ of David Hockney or Alex Colville. James Fenton’s ‘Dead Soldiers’, ‘A German Requiem’ and ‘Children in Exile’ are poems that work by a new and at first disconcerting technique, not to move us or to establish feeling, but to suggest a situation where ...”

“... crops and livestock more productive; the introduction of herbicides and pesticides; the so-called Green Revolution of the 1950s; and maybe the yield-increasing, drought and disease-resisting effects of genetically modified crops (if we’re willing to eat them). In Malthus’s time, it took twenty thousand square metres of agricultural land to feed one ...”

“... The Force (1966), has a title surely designed to evoke Thomas’s ‘The force that through the green fuse drives the flower’. In Redgrove’s work, as in Thomas’s, sexual energy and the force of the natural world are conjoined. The Force is, among other things, a celebration of Redgrove’s first marriage and family, but it’s filled with wildly ...”

“... now if one who comes of the same stock has not a right to give his opinion in such like cases. David Hume liked this story, and in 1741 retold it in his marvellous essay ‘Of the Standard of Taste’, where he wrestled with the question of whether such delicacy of judgment was really possible. Some people doubted any such thing, but he did not. Writing in ...”

“... border route. I remember . . . the incredibly blue sea and the mountain chain, on its slopes green vineyards with a hint of gold between them, and a sky as blue as the sea.’ It was France as she’d not had occasion to see it before. It extended south beyond the bays and on to the shores of the Maghreb, over the Rif mountains, across the desert and ...”

“... and Frankenstein, to George Cukor’s Gaslight (1944), the Sherlock Holmes movie The Woman in Green (1945) and Invasion of the Bodysnatchers (1956). The border between fiction and reality in the early years of the Cold War was blurred further as novelists began to mine the seam of science and skulduggery. A pulp thriller from 1955, The Splintered ...”

“... The ludicrous Mr Kenneth Baker blames the Church, and in particular the Bishop of Liverpool, David Sheppard, probably because he’s the only socialist in sight.22 February. A large crowd gathers outside Bootle Magistrates Court, to jeer as the vans carrying the two ten-year-olds accused of the toddler’s murder are driven away. One man eludes the ...”

“... new recruits inspired by the example of Khomeini himself. Hizbullah ‘had two progenitors’, David Hirst wrote in his seminal book on Lebanon, Beware of Small States (2010). ‘If Iran was one – with Syria, so to speak, as midwife – Israel was unquestionably the other. Iran furnished the model and the means, Syria the facilities, Israel – with its ...”