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“... finesse and a military-trained marksman. He had been at Reed College in Portland with Snyder and Philip Whalen, a formidable Pacific Rim triumvirate of youthful poets and seekers. Heavily dosed on Gertrude Stein, and fired up by a chance encounter with William Carlos Williams, Welch was confirmed in his destiny as an outsider, a casual labourer, cab ...”

“... also an internationalist, deeply hostile to the Little Englandism of many of his peers, notably Philip Larkin and Kingsley Amis. He wrote a book about Czeslaw Milosz, translated many poems from Polish and Russian. In his memoir, These the Companions, he describes what he improbably calls F.R. Leavis’s charm, but the hero of the book is the Californian ...”

“... anyway, collected in Slotkin’s book and in Warrior Dreams (1994) by James William Gibson. When Philip Caputo joined the Marines, he saw himself ‘charging up some distant beachhead, like John Wayne in Sands of Iwo Jima’. ‘War movies with John Wayne’ sent Ron Kovic to Vietnam: ‘Yes, I gave my dead dick for John Wayne,’ he said when he returned a ...”

“... to implicated stalker, caught in a pan-metropolitan drama of flow.The more I became absorbed in Philip Mosley’s translations of the essays, the more I identified with Vaes. There was one section of ‘An Antwerp Palimpsest’, originally published in 1993, so close to what I had tried (and failed) to say at that time that I began to think I must have ...”

“... his own need to reassure his parents, much got left out. In a series of interviews Hecht did with Philip Hoy in 1999, however, published in the Waywiser Press series ‘Between the Lines’, Hecht had more to say about what he had witnessed at Flossenbürg in 1945: When we arrived, the SS personnel had, of course, fled. Prisoners were dying at the rate of ...”

“... than spectacular, and grey and white though they are they still seem exotic. Bitterly cold with snow forecast later so we get off early up the M6 to Penrith and Brampton, hoping to have a look at the Written Rock, a quarry by the river at Brampton with an inscription carved by the legion that cut the stone here for nearby Hadrian’s Wall. But it’s too ...”

“... of Star Wars decades later.’ This is, bizarrely, to dismiss or ignore most of the career of Philip K. Dick; perhaps Ballard’s dystopian fictions have too much in common with Dick’s for him to be able to look him in the eye. He doesn’t think there’s much around now that’s any good, either, which is to overlook not only the work of such writers ...”

“... turned fast and reckless. ‘Go ahead is our maxim and our password,’ the New York politician Philip Hone wrote in 1837. ‘We go ahead with a vengeance, regardless of the consequences and indifferent about the value of human life.’ Most contemporaries were more exuberant about the American ‘passwords’: get ahead, go ahead, ascend, succeed and ...”

“... effective bulwarks against the neo-liberal attack. The appointment of the former Shell executive Philip Carroll to run the Baghdad energy ministry was logical, given Paul Bremer’s belief that the Iraqi Governing Council’s attachment to oil nationalisation ‘had to be changed’. Bremer’s first act as proconsul, after all, had been directed at the 190 ...”

“... here and there a solitary figure or fragment remaining, as we see flecks and scraps of snow left in cold dells and mountain clefts, in June and July. For the genius that created it creates now somewhat else. The Greek letters last a little longer, but are already passing under the same sentences, and tumbling into the inevitable pit which the ...”

“... in serious poems can work will be seen in Auden’s ‘Shield of Achilles’, and in many of Philip Larkin’s poems. Rhyming in Larkin amounts to invisible virtuosity: you’d notice the difference if the rhymes weren’t there, but you hardly notice that they are. ‘That Building’ is a good case of this negative brilliance. Couplets are especially ...”

“... us how it was for them, and perceptive novelists such as Nigel Balchin, William Cooper and C.P. Snow expose much that is true in the guise of fiction. Drawing upon a variety of sources – reports of Royal Commissions, obiter dicta of scientific notables, newspaper editorials etc – Dr Gummett gives us the first coherent, objective, yet sympathetic ...”

“... of mediocrity’, is accused of being a ‘false friend’, full of ‘rage or jealousy’. Philip Larkin’s unkind remarks about Powell are summarised and termed ‘the most awful abuse’. Auberon Waugh’s review of one of Powell’s collections of essays is called typically ‘cruel’. These, then, are all apparently the acts of Powell’s ...”

“... journal. They also struck me as a bit chippy – like Iofur Raknison, the armoured bear in Philip Pullman’s His Dark Materials who wants to have a daemon of his own, so he too can be human, but has to be content with playacting with a puppet. But I have to admit that, after attending to their shouts and murmurs, I’ve been won over to their view. In ...”

“... had UGLY written across the forehead and another SPAM. 27 January. To Leeds by the 9.10 train with snow flurries much of the way. I call at the British Epilepsy Association, where I have to sign some books as prizes in a writing competition. The premises are in Hanover Square up behind the Town Hall and beyond the Infirmary, and, when I was a boy, one of the ...”