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“... there are many more.’ It’s these other tones which are missing in The Ice-Pilot Speaks. Anne Stevenson compares Stainer to Emily Dickinson, but she reminds me more of Edith Sitwell, particularly the Sitwell of Façade, not in terms of rhythm (which Sitwell used quite skilfully and Stainer hardly uses at all) but in terms of emotional range and ...”

“... himself ‘entitled to seek out and obtain what he craved, instantly’. Kennedy said that David Cecil’s biography of Lord Melbourne, which depicted young aristocrats having a good time while performing heroic feats in the service of Queen and country, was one of his favourite books. When Kennedy was about to run for the Senate, according to ...”

“... the supreme politician of the age. He was wrong. The party chose its liberal darling Adlai Stevenson for a second time, even though he stood little chance of defeating Eisenhower. Johnson received barely 5 per cent of the ballot. What surprised his supporters was not so much that he failed – it was hard to see how he could have succeeded, given his ...”

“... thanks to propaganda campaigns spearheaded by Bullingdon Club toffs like Boris Johnson and David Cameron, underwent significant revision. In the late 1960s and early 1970s, when the horse path alongside the Regent’s Canal was mud, and forbidden to pedestrians and cyclists alike, I rode to my gardening job in Limehouse on a market wreck bought for ...”

“... words enough? Do we think the leavings of a life contain some ancillary truth? When Robert Louis Stevenson died his business-minded Scottish nanny quietly began selling locks of the infant’s hair which she claimed to have cut forty years earlier. The believers, the seekers, the pursuers bought enough hair to stuff a sofa. The house of Croisset ... what was ...”

“... centre’ concerned with the local history of immigration. Above the tiny synagogue is the room of David Rodinsky, a Polish Jew of increasingly mysterious reputation. Latterly described as a translator and philosopher, he is said to have lived here in some sort of caretaking capacity. One day in the Sixties Rodinsky stepped out into Princelet Street and ...”

“... would that be all right by me? I was very happy about it. We were both admirers of Robert Louis Stevenson. Kidnapped was really our favourite, but we couldn’t call our daughter David, or name her after Alan Breck. She’d have to be named for the sequel.Like all my contemporaries, in those first years when the ...”

“... portrait, albeit of a distinctively colonial character and quality. Last year, the art historian David Bindman, who has studied the picture closely for thirty years, proposed that it is in fact a self-portrait, painted by Williams himself.What is the intent of the image and what is created by its beholders? The problem of Francis Williams’s portrait shows ...”

“... alongside the solitary star. But there is a difference. Good poets in the Alvarez anthology, like David Holbrook or Norman MacCaig, have their counterparts in the present collection, but while not being egotistically impetuous and obsessed in the way Alvarez desiderated, they were also not haunted, as their successors appear to be, by wistful feelings about ...”

“... following the publication of Treasure Island, Kidnapped and Dr Jekyll and Mr Hyde, Robert Louis Stevenson earned £5000 a year for a few years. But he was easily surpassed by Rider Haggard, ‘perhaps the country’s best-paid writer between 1887 and 1894, when his earnings exceeded £10,000 annually’. His income started to fall away thereafter, but later ...”

“... grown out of such silliness, another notable casualty of which was Jackie Kennedy, with whom Adlai Stevenson asked the cast of Beyond the Fringe to supper in New York in 1963. They went and I didn’t. Never spelling it out to myself, I clung far too long to the notion that shyness was a virtue and not, as I came too late to see, a bore. I don’t quite spill ...”

“... of Scottish post-Union society, Jacques Leruez’s L’ Ecosse: une nation sans état (1983) and David McCrone’s Understanding Scotland: The Sociology of a Stateless Nation (1992). He gives a more political twist to these important analyses, attempting what amounts to a general ideological reassessment of post-1707 history: ‘In effect, if not in ...”

“... rise in the price of fuel could kill many of them off.’Before leaving I had rung a pig farmer, David Barker, whose farm is north of Stowmarket in Suffolk. Barker is 50 years old. His family has been farming pigs in Suffolk for four generations; they have lived and worked on the present farm since 1957. He owns 1250 acres and 110 sows, which he breeds and ...”