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“... and already admired as a composer before enlistment; in the trenches poetry had occupied him more and more and, when he returned afterwards to music, the poetry continued. The asylum cut him off, therefore, from what had been a life of continuous intellectual companionship – in music, poetry and trench-life. In the ...”

“... celestial clockwork. That was in the 17th century. Now medicine has become, in the words of Lewis Thomas, the youngest science; and the kind of wanton incompetence that did for Josef Shklovsky has passed into history, at least in the West. Or has it? In 1983, the Journal of the American Medical Society published the results of a study on 100 deaths, all shown ...”

“... poems, and his most interesting so far. Whereas, in the earlier books, he didn’t do a great deal more than exercise the quirky, oblique lyricism which has become his personal signature, he puts it here to the service of an idea, or complex of ideas, which constitutes a private poetry of departure. An ‘inner émigré’, in Seamus Heaney’s phrase, he ...”

“... what it is, but they should ban it.’Another time, she complained that the woman next door had more TV channels than her. ‘That’s because she’s got a Smart TV, mum,’ my brother said. ‘We could get you one and you’d have all the channels you want.’ The following week it was all set up and Gerry was showing her how to use the remote control. He ...”

“... abolition’, in four years’ time, or seven, when the time was right. And even that more moderate resolution went too far for the House of Lords, which rejected the principle of abolition on any timetable, at least until the Lords had conducted its own investigation, which was repeatedly postponed during the French and then the Haitian ...”

“... the last four leaders of the United Kingdom Independence Party, then you really ought to get out more. And no, none of them was or is Nigel Farage, although of the ten leaders the party has had in the past ten years, he did fill the post three times. Ukip has been the most successful single-issue movement in England since the suffragettes, but it has been ...”

“... practical expression to the idea that art matters that make Crawford’s apology for a book ‘more ponderous than its subject deserves’ unnecessary. Ashbee’s ideas were a legacy of Ruskin and Morris: the Ruskin who could write of a little girl he saw in ill-fitting hand-me-downs when he was lecturing in Oxford that ‘nothing spoken about art’ could ...”

“... than Latin, so the title translates roughly as ‘Fragments of Things in the Vernacular’. The more obvious meaning, ‘Fragments of Everyday Things’, is also present, and perhaps ironic – to be disappointed in love is indeed a common experience, though when viewed through the distorting lens of 14th-century poetry it becomes something complicated and ...”

“... as it must have been in Hardy’s, in Hudson’s and in Jefferies’s days, if the army, and more recently the air force, had not got hold of it. As it is, the army is up in Salisbury Plain with towns of barracks and genteel soldiers’ housing and with all the mess of tin huts and tank tracks, and the air force is down in the northern plain with the ...”

“... 16 and a bit years had earned him the sobriquet ‘the Mad Bomber’. The Bomber had planted more than thirty explosive devices, favouring public places such as cinemas, train stations, libraries and phone booths. He hadn’t killed anyone but his bombs were becoming bigger and the injuries they were inflicting were growing worse. In their desperation ...”

“... into the Confucian Book of Songs. In the Modernist era, the poets, as Pound wisecracked, have been more interested in Muses than Moses and though bits of the Psalms have inevitably been embedded in poems, new translations have become the province of theologians and academics. The latest is a handsome edition, complete with the requisite red ribbon, by Robert ...”

“... of belief without evidence as one of the core Christian virtues. Later formulations could be more explicitly fideistic. That Christ was resurrected is certain, Tertullian claimed, because it is impossible. The Reformation principle of justification by faith alone raised the stakes: now faith was not only one of the three theological virtues, but the sole ...”

“... ready: “An please your honour, I don’t understand horses.”’ If he had met the young groom Thomas Hammond he might have found even worse things to say about the conduct of the serving classes. ‘Never take a rebuke from your master for stealing without telling him to go to hell’; ‘If you are hired as a companion to a travelling horseback ...”

“... her business: she is challenged rather by the split between Dave and his wife, when Dave finds a more loving and lovable girl. Mrs Ruddock senior hears about Dave’s amour from her daughter-in-law. ‘The car mileage was just proof,’ says Mrs Ruddock junior. ‘I could tell a month ago he’d got a fancy woman, the way he acted. He didn’t come near me ...”

“... sees as a continuous process of creative destruction, refusing to let any obstacle block its path? Thomas Bender and Mike Davis are two of America’s leading urban scholars. Bender is a cultural historian known for his accounts of the intellectual and aesthetic life of US cities, and for tracing the distinctively metropolitan influences on American ...”