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“... Alexie’s characters know more about basketball and Hollywood, heavy metal and Hank Williams, than they do about buffalo. His young men might believe that they’re supposed to be warriors, but most of them know that’s a hopeless fantasy. Instead they are unemployed, or in prison, or alcoholic, or driving a truck. Alexie’s first novel and ...”

“... idea of a modern politician turning down such a soundbite opportunity makes one sigh. Similarly, Michael Jago reproduces part of an interview with Honor Balfour in 1967: Balfour: What was the greatest achievement of the Labour government? Attlee: Indian independence. Balfour: What was the greatest problem you faced? Attlee: Russia. Balfour: What was the ...”

“... executioners claim to believe in it too, any more than you find Morocco unpleasant just because Michael Portillo drops in on the place occasionally. In Orwell’s view, it was the Stalinist Left that had betrayed the common people, not democratic socialists like himself. Orwell first encountered Stalinism in the squalid betrayals of the Spanish Civil ...”

“... that her presence saved the lives of the other staff on several occasions. Norman Cigar and Paul Williams argue that war crimes prosecutions are necessary not simply for the well-rehearsed reasons – ending cultures of impunity, achieving ‘closure’, restoring faith in due process – but because they seek to establish individual responsibility and, in ...”

“... outlandish things still lay ahead of him, and he was stuck in the Canary Islands, William Carlos Williams wrote: ‘Bunting is living the life, I don’t know how sufficiently to praise him for it. But it can’t be very comfortable to exist that way. I feel uneasy not to be sending him his year’s rent and to be backing at the same time a book of my own ...”

“... of banjo, guitar, cowboy music (especially the ‘lonesome’ feel), Jimmie Rodgers, Hank Williams. The link into Dylan, the subject of Part Two, is Elvis Presley. One’s doubts about how illuminating all this is, in relation to the beginnings of Dylan’s own contribution, are reinforced by this division in the text, but no doubt Mellers could reply ...”

“... he proclaims the artificiality of his mode in his opening sentence, where he announces that Fanny Williams, his heroine, ‘would have been much better off in an opera than a novel’. This is to be an operatic work – opera being another medium which deals in gross magnification. Child of a humble Welsh background, Fanny was a successful model and ...”

“... references are to Baudelaire and Nerval, but his work is often close to that of William Carlos Williams and Wallace Stevens. Weinberger tells us that when he (correctly) identified a touch of Whitman in the title and rhythms of the poem ‘I Speak of the City’, Paz said: ‘No, I was thinking of Langston Hughes: The Negro Speaks of Rivers.’ This ...”

“... pursuit of implication. There were attempts to keep the two ways of thinking together. Raymond Williams wrote of ‘structures of feeling’ but didn’t forget expressions of feeling. Foucault’s metaphor of archaeology was loyal to Lévi-Strauss’s buried history but allowed constant connections to the visible history of the material ...”

“... the quick brown foxes who understand the game and like to play it: Christopher Hitchens, Michael Winner, Emin again and Jarvis Cocker, whom she wanted to impress so much when he came to her house, she hid the pot-pourri. But she’s a little nervous – though she pretends not to be – around the hedgehogs, such as Hilary Mantel, in this book, and ...”

“... King’s company – his cause being just and his quarrel honourable,’ says the disguised King; Williams answers, ‘That’s more than we know.’ We sense at once in Henry’s words the fatal element of rhetorical assumption; the King heartily assumes a willingness to die in (his own) company, after which the very modesty of ...”

“... Then there were the monumental bronzes: the Madonna and Child in Cavendish Square and the St Michael at Coventry, for example. These were well-liked by most people and liked very much indeed by many. Because they are whole figures, not just heads, you can see how Epstein handled poses: they tend to be solemn, formal and frontal, the palms of the hands ...”

“... part of Africa.Everill situates her history within an economic historiography pioneered by Eric Williams and Joseph Inikori, but it’s also a complement to J.H. Plumb and Neil McKendrick’s vision of a consumer revolution. In the former tradition, the histories of enslavement and economic development are understood to be inextricable: as Britain exploited ...”

“... For twenty years, since I first read the first poem, ‘To Go to Lvov’, in his first English-language book, Tremor (1985), I have had a happily unexamined admiration for the work of the Polish poet Adam Zagajewski. Hence, perhaps, the inordinate difficulty – even for me, with my sluggishness and resistances – in approaching it now in a spirit of ...”

“... your twenties, facing Sampras or Philippoussis or Ivanisevic, or even Navratilova, Hingis or Venus Williams: can’t be done, no way at all even of being on the same court, much less hitting their balls back. Two decades ago, wooden rackets were replaced by high-tech instruments engineered to the utmost in hitting efficiency, and daily restrung, for ever more ...”