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“... social drinker. He recalls that after the match which won Arsenal the Premiership in 1998, Stephen Hughes in the general excitement sprayed beer over him, some of which went on his lips: ‘It made me angry and I told him so – after which the poor kid spent the whole time apologising to me.’ Much of the book is inevitably about football, and Adams’s ...”

“... next volume like crack,’ Zadie Smith writes. As the literary critic – and former junkie – Michael Clune has pointed out, we tend to reach for drug metaphors when we find ourselves taking pleasure in a book without being able to ascribe our interest to respectable literary values. Is Knausgaard, despite all the comparisons to Proust, more like reality ...”

“... than murder. Nonetheless, the cuts, together with the further weakening of the LEAs as a result of Michael Gove’s education ‘reforms’, conform to a pattern of persistent Conservative attacks on the scope and autonomy of local government. Where this attack differs from its predecessors is that the Tories’ partners in crime are the arch-defenders of ...”

“... eccentric or somewhat controversial deceased or elderly relatives than great poets-in-waiting. Ted Hughes already feels like a rumour. It’s as though the human reef of literature was not considering any more applications, or the escalator had ground to a halt. To say that anyone who cares about poetry should read Lowell is not enough. (Can it be that they ...”

“... pure style aims to express the inexpressible. Commenting on Czerniawski’s sympathetic artistry, Michael Irwin has noted that while Milosz’s translations of Rozewicz appear ‘irreducible’, Czerniawski improves on them by his daring elisions and sharp intelligence. The result is a poetry of ‘absolute transparency’, and some Polish reviewers have ...”

“... about Ulster’s part in the Second World War. There was a line in it about a young guy, Ray Hughes, who’d joined the British Army – ‘amazing, and him a Catholic!’ one character chipped in. David had objected strongly, saying that the only VC awarded to an Ulsterman during the war had been won by a Catholic, James Magennis. One of the people on ...”

“... 1950s sensibility. The new generation of poets, dominated by the Big H brands (Geoffrey Hill, Ted Hughes, Tony Harrison, Seamus Heaney), were prosodically and thematically more ambitious. And the cultural mood of the later decades of the 20th century was not indulgent to the perceived misogyny and Little Englandism of Larkin and Amis when biographies and ...”

“... first time I saw, or looked repeatedly at, a painting by Frank Auerbach was in the art historian Michael Podro’s living room – it must have been in 1968. The painting was Primrose Hill, Autumn Morning. I’d barely heard of Auerbach at that point (modern painting for me was French and American), and I certainly didn’t have a clue who had done the ...”

“... the Gentility Principle’ (the introduction to his anthology The New Poetry, which promoted Hughes and Plath over the stodgy Movement), Edward Lucie-Smith and, terrifyingly, Michael Horovitz, the editor of ‘one of the decade’s genuinely polemical anthologies: Children of Albion (1969)’. Stevenson’s fondness ...”

“... and Larkin and Geoffrey Hill, say, and producing learned monographs on the Movement or on Ted Hughes suddenly took the notion to write a book about Frederic Prokosch (a poet, like Day Lewis, who made most of his money from novels), or Archibald MacLeish (again, like Day Lewis, a career poet and professor). There are in fact two versions of the story of ...”

“... of nearly a hundred thousand people attending his funeral in Belfast. One week later, Francis Hughes died, and eight more men – Patsy O’Hara, Raymond McCreesh, Joe McDonnell, Martin Hurson, Kevin Lynch, Kieran Doherty, Thomas McElwee and Michael Devine – starved themselves to death in the months that ...”

“... says, remoteness is synonymous with integrity. But Hull isn’t even particularly remote. Ted Hughes, living in Devon, is further from London (as the crow flies, of course) than Larkin ever was but that he gets no credit for it is partly the place’s fault, Devon to the metropolitan crowd having nothing on the horrors of Hull. ...”

“... Paul Lauter’s revisionist Heath Anthology of American Literature (1990) and Myra Jehlen and Michael Warner’s English Literatures of America (1996), but they do so in diametrically opposed ways. The new Norton turns outward to include a staggering array of post-colonial writers, from Chinua Achebe to Alice Munro to Les Murray. (None of the ten ...”

“... a car plant in Britain if Labour won the election, which was a lie; the Express said that Robert Hughes MP was affiliated to the Soviet Friendship Society, which was another lie; the Sun tried to swing the Chesterfield by-election with a fraudulent ‘psychiatric analysis’ of Tony Benn. Henry Porter, once again displaying a complete disregard for personal ...”

“... the literary agent, who is the dedicatee of Duffy. Harder to crack is the pseudonymous code of Michael Crichton, the omnicompetent ‘movelist’. (He is author of The Andromeda Strain, director and producer of Coma, director and scriptwriter of Westworld.) Crichton stands six feet seven inches tall. Two of his writing pseudonyms are ‘John Lange’ and ...”