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“... on her work as worthy of parody – not just recognisable, but recognised. When Thomas Hardy, John Masefield and Walter de la Mare secured her a civil list pension in 1923, Mew couldn’t decide whether it was more ‘like a dream or a nightmare’. Such diffidence also contained defiance. Her public readings were bracing affairs – ‘like having ...”

“... months earlier, and the US air force and Iraqi army bombardment drove out the rest. In cars or on foot, thousands moved east towards Baghdad or across Anbar province. There were few reporters around to film or catalogue their plight. Unlike the displaced residents of Aleppo, who could be described as the victims of Russian and Syrian government ...”

“... elbow, talking incessantly in an incomprehensible accent. Ford, it would seem, could barely set foot outside his front door without importunate persons of one kind or another falling in beside him. When he lived in Holland Park Avenue, he would take his morning walk with Ezra Pound at one elbow, barely visible beneath an immense sombrero, and at the other ...”

“... with the publication in 2003 of its magisterial sixth volume, written by the general editor, John Baker, and covering the years 1483-1558. It then went back to the beginning, with R.H. Helmholz’s opening volume on early canon law. The rest was silence, until in 2010 the series sailed suddenly and magnificently into port without any of the remaining ...”

“... a Bothy Nicht at the Imperial Hotel in Aberdeen where he heard the ballad singing and stories of John Strachan, an Aberdeenshire farmer who became one of his most important sources. In ‘Journey to a Kingdom’, an unpublished poem written in 1938, Henderson leaves no doubt that these northern excursions were conscious acts of homecoming. In the summer of ...”

“... you can’t bring yourself to love it. It’s a position that has its advocates. A few years ago, John Mueller’s Atomic Obsession: Nuclear Alarmism from Hiroshima to al-Qaida urged a relaxed attitude: far more has been spent on nuclear weapons than can be justified by any sensible political strategy; they aren’t of much military use; their proliferation ...”

“... with death one day’. Hamsun had almost no direct knowledge of England. The only time he set foot there was to catch the train from Hull docks to Liverpool, on his way from Oslo to America in the 1880s. But it may well be that had he known the country better it would have made little difference; On the Cultural Life of Modern America (1889) is full of ...”

“... as a newsworthy invader of this retreat. A few years back, when the dead-windowed block at the foot of the park was still the Queen Elizabeth Hospital for Children, a giant Mickey Mouse was choppered in to put the frighteners on the sick kids. And also to act, if only we had recognised it, as a premature ambassador for the coming corporate bonanza. The ...”

“... furniture; a deep window ledge held a small number of books: The Highland Clearances by John Prebble, pamphlets on local flora, a field guide to birds, Gavin Maxwell’s Ring of Bright Water. After we’d unpacked, we went for a stroll over the salt marsh. The tide was out, leaving creeks and channels. A bridge spanned the river that ran, swollen ...”

“... home has left: what would Walser say to walking back with him in the night, it’s two hours on foot? Walser promptly agrees: The writer then stayed as our guest for a couple of days. Should I say something of his appearance? Well, he doesn’t look the way a reader of his books would imagine him, or a painter paint him. All his books have something ...”

“... and then introduced a new form, a three-step line characterised by what he called the ‘variable foot’. The poems that resulted were far more abstract, and more ruminative, than anything he had written before: this style must have seemed to Williams as a means of avoiding the excessive dependence on description, and on other people’s voices, which had ...”

“... nuclear deterrent), were thought to be unpopular, and its changes were accepted by John Smith when he succeeded Kinnock as leader after the 1992 election. Smith was not a member of the soft left, however; nor did he anticipate New Labour. The party he led was still recognisably in the British social-democratic tradition; still one in which the ...”

“... nimble, complex and graceful, the dance included a move called the tripudium, three stamps of the foot so heavy that Catullus worried that if they performed the dance at Colonia they might demolish its bridge. The same triple stamping was included in the rites of the Arval Brethren revived by Augustus, and always thereafter including the reigning monarch ...”

“... one does: ‘When I was in graduate school I was startled to find this story’s source in The John Collier Reader, – or so I have always believed until this afternoon, when I first riffled, then paged carefully, front to back, back to front, through the local copy (Knopf, 1972) and discovered no trace of such a story anywhere in the book.’ But over ...”

“... the gardens of Newstead Abbey. ‘Iris Origo, like Byron, was soaked in Italy,’ said Michael Foot, who cited her book as the inspiration for his own writings about the poet. The comment is apposite also for The Merchant of Prato, which is steeped in the landscape and culture of Tuscany as much as in a particular period of its history. Though she was born ...”