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“... Alexander Dru, for the quality of his mind; the other, among the war leaders encountered, is Lord Portal – apparently for the mildness of his manner as Chairman of the Travellers’ Club General Committee. ‘Portal was indeed a leader for whom one guessed it would have been easily possible to feel devotion, though I never knew him personally. The only ...”

“... a composer who has now, regrettably, stopped composing. The poet John Birtwhistle supplied David Blake with the libretto for his unusual opera, The Plumber’s Gift. David Malouf has devised a Kipling libretto, Baa Baa Black Sheep, for Michael Berkeley. Blake Morrison is, with the composer Gavin Bryars, engaged on an ...”

“... of Deterrence, published in 1983 with the same editors. Both were designed, according to Nigel Blake and Kay Pole, to rescue a debate in which issues were being ‘extremely badly handled’ either because, though philosophical in nature, they were not being treated as such, or because, though they were recognised as philosophical, the treatment was ...”

“... power, then they are not free persons living in a free nation, but merely slaves of an arbitrary lord whose will they cannot contest. That it is out of the question to think of the people of England in this way is then made abundantly clear in one of Milton’s most thundering passages: For as to this question in hand, what the people by their just right ...”

“... very hospitable. ‘Mock on, mock on, Voltaire, Rousseau,/Mock on, mock on: ’tis all in vain!’ Blake cries with all his effortless superiority. I find it slightly weird to see each year how warmly and spontaneously students endorse Blake’s attack on the spiritual blight of materialism and rationalism and experimental ...”

“... her with India. You can’t beat that, it’s better than Wyatt Earp.’ And it’s as good as Lord Byron. Take the life of Disraeli, for ‘novelist’ read ‘poet’, and you’ve got an epic about what happened to Byron after he’d recovered from that deadly fever at Missolonghi. Having fought for Greek independence, he falls out of love with the ...”

“... of this,’ MacCaig says in ‘City Fog’ (A World of Difference), ‘when we chatted with the Lord / on that funny mountain.’ His demeanour among the archetypes of European culture is notably free of awe. Mercury is referred to, in passing, as ‘god / of debit and credit and inventor / of double-entry book-keeping’; the play of Hamlet is reduced to a ...”

“... on my feet in the House of Lords, trying to interest them in a point of stygian obscurity, when Lord Lowry, a former chief justice of Northern Ireland, put down his pen and said in the kindliest of voices: ‘Mr Sedley, it seems to me you’re trying to make a pig out of a pound of ...”

“... to revisit the recent royal wedding, and the communal singing of a peculiar poem by William Blake that has gained national anthem status. It was not much thought of until it acquired a splendid musical setting, an inspired piece of bombast by Sir Hubert Parry; ever since, the English have much enjoyed noisily pledging that they will not cease from ...”

“... v. the Elgin Marbles, lasted more than a decade and remains the best-known episode of his career. Lord Elgin, Britain’s ambassador at Constantinople, had carried off the sculptures of the Athenian temples, after a century of wanton damage by Turkish soldiery, and before they could be looted piecemeal by the rival collectors of Europe. Elgin, who was ...”

“... These six volumes are crammed with comédie humaine and the parliamentary puppetry that seems, as Blake said, something other than human life. There’s also a masterly volume of summary and analysis by the editor, David Fisher, who dislikes paragraphs and believes in calling a bastard a bastard. Inevitably, such an exhaustive work of reference answers ...”

“... Press sensationalism about the secret world has made discussion of its reform almost impossible. Lord Scott, in his inquiry, said that ‘government should, in my opinion, make it its business to do what it can to ensure that its critics are not ill-informed.’ Departmental secrecy, especially in the Ministry of Defence, conceals monstrous wastes of ...”

“... the marriage was under so much strain that Cheever’s father invited an abortionist to dinner. As Blake Bailey writes in his biography: ‘It was a story that haunted Cheever the rest of his life … Not surprisingly, he saw fit to blame his mother for having the bad taste to tell him of the episode.’ The family was affluent at first, living in a large ...”

“... although often unexceptionable – it lacks intellectual force and doesn’t seem hard-won. Blake is meant to be a significant presence in A Bottle in the Smoke, both as a poet and as the subject of Gilchrist’s Life, and his view that ‘the inner world is all-important’ is appealed to more than once. But Julian’s re-creation of his former life ...”

“... by a divine, vibrating light, he appeared to stand like a companion spirit to … William Blake.’ In Craig’s persona, Holroyd is petulant and selfish – ‘He needed to recruit new enthusiasts, but how could he be certain they would not make off with his ideas?’ – and adds Brechtian commentary to his empathetic descriptions of Craig’s state ...”