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“... to overthrow. He may be tempted to reject the demand altogether. This reaction is naturally self-fuelling; the further one goes, the more irrelevant the demand may seem. However, the demand to get it right has great survival value. All the philosophers who have been found interesting for more than a very brief period of fashion have been driven by a ...”

“... scepticism with a sense of becoming increasingly youthful as the years pass, he recalls: A self-ordained professor’s tongue Too serious to fool. Writing about Dylan, as against listening to him, is not easy and it’s useful to have Wilfrid Mellers’s ‘backdrop’ to Dylan, after his recent offerings, Twilight of the Gods, about the Beatles, Bach ...”

“... has already been lost. In the US and the UK inequalities of market income (wages, income from self-employment, dividends etc) carry through to inequalities of income after tax and benefits. In practice, it’s hard to alter this through redistribution alone: the key is to change the way the rewards of economic success are distributed in the first ...”

“... practices and institutions which embodied both this ‘universal’ patriotism and a desire for self-improvement were forged from a sturdy amalgam of tradition, religious observance, deference, support of the military, pride, dislike of change and adherence to class and community. The brass band movement in particular conformed to Orwell’s view of ...”

“... Reagan’s difficulties in securing Senate approval for his nominee for the Supreme Court, Robert Bork. Few people have been honest enough to admit that they didn’t really know the answer to either question. After all, those who did know were either the clever market operators who escaped intact before the crash happened; or the Cassandras whose ...”

“... his readers through a particular poem. Valéry, Allen Tate, William Empson, John Crowe Ransom, Robert Penn Warren and Robert Lowell were instructive in that way. But it is rare for a poet to lead readers through a poem, draft by draft, or explain how he settled for one word rather than another. Yeats did not offer to ...”

“... by the exiled Madame de Staël, that it was this street that she missed most of all – whilst Robert Brasillach lived in the more elongated ugliness of the Rue Lecourbe, not far removed. But when they were in Spain, at the time of the Civil War, they were on different sides, and the books they wrote about the war were in sharp contrast one to the ...”

“... of Eleanor Farjeon’s Edward Thomas: The Last Four Years there is actually little danger, for her self-effacing tone, though pointedly, is not disruptively so; her story, especially towards the end, becomes a vehicle for Thomas’s letters, and it is in fact from these that Motion quotes. Helen Thomas’s books – As it was, World without End and Time and ...”

“... of Kafka’s art. Chief among these were the voices of Walter Benjamin, Maurice Blanchot, Marthe Robert and Erich Heller. Heller’s essay on The Castle in The Disinherited Mind (1952) marked a real turning point. He argued persuasively that it was folly to go on debating whether Kafka was religious or anti-religious, Marxist or bourgeois, Calvinist or ...”

“... for a moment the idea that poetry could be, in some degree, or from some points of view, a self-justifying activity.’ Why should it be that, insofar as it’s possible to abstract ‘the modern English poem’ and ‘the modern American poem’, the former seems to someone with no axe to grind (I mean myself) less spacious, less athletic, less ...”

“... this persuasion she did nothing to controvert – so that when her ardent admirer and close friend Robert Liddell engaged in a somewhat demeaning rummage in Burke and Crockford in search of distinguished Compton-Burnetts whether living or dead and gone, he was astonished to discover none at all. Both Burnetts and Comptons had in fact been farm labourers not ...”

“... presiding presence; his poetry is the bar before which other poets –Auden and Eliot, Hardy and Robert Lowell and Browning. Pound and, yes, Hill – are brought to judgment. This is not overt. Robinson can’t, any more than the rest of us, come on like a latter-day Leavis, a fearlessly normative critic; instead, psychologists and moral philosophers are ...”

“... the 1890s as newspaper sketch-artists in Philadelphia. Drawn together by the magnetic preaching of Robert Henri, a slightly older painter who had returned from art school in Paris to his native Philadelphia feverish with the spirit of Left Bank aesthetic revolt, they coalesced into a dissident brotherhood dedicated to an art which championed the contemporary ...”

“... take care to establish the way its main character speaks before his stroke. We’re introduced to Robert ‘Doc’ Wright in Antarctica, where he works for several months each year as a technical assistant and guide to geographical researchers. The first thing we hear from him is a phatic murmur delivered into a faulty radio: ‘Thomas? Luke? Come in? This is ...”

“... figure, and in Anthony Munday’s Robin Hood play within a play, The Downfall and Death of Robert Earl of Huntingdon, a ‘real-life’ Skelton takes the role of Friar Tuck. His recovery came on the back of the rise of Modernism, with its opening of readers’ minds to new kinds of non-traditional poetry, and it was confirmed with the appearance of ...”