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“... inference by adding, with a nod to sanity: ‘If design govern in a thing so small.’ Now what is Meyers’s ‘new reading’ of this sonnet, which he regards as Frost’s ‘greatest poem’? Meyers’s observations are tediously un-new (drawing as they do on Randall Jarrell and Lionel Trilling); but he adds one triumphant new ...”

“... for it with Hera and Aphrodite, and before too long Paris, their adjudicator, will be seducing Helen and Agamemnon will be sacrificing his daughter to secure a favourable wind for Troy. There will follow long accounts of battles and heroic deeds, perhaps something on the untimely death of Thetis’ son, Achilles, Odysseus’ victory in the dispute over his ...”

“... people whom he could move around ‘like God’. Eudora Welty’s people live mostly in, or near, small free-floating towns like Morgana, with its water tank and courthouse and its ‘Confederate soldier on a shaft’ that resembles ‘a chewed-on candle, as if old gnashing teeth had made him’. They go their own ways and are not haunted by history. You can ...”

“... in 1938, accompanied by other alcoholic tramps, including a well-educated and musical woman called Helen and a weak, grey-haired man called Rudy, who claims to be half-Cherokee – but Francis, who bullies Rudy in a protective way, tells him his mother was only a Mex: ‘That’s why you got them high cheekbones. Indian I don’t buy.’ William Kennedy tells ...”

“... called her ‘the most celebrated of the young American women painters’. Joan Mitchell, Helen Frankenthaler and Grace Hartigan at the opening of Frankenthaler’s solo exhibition at Tibor de Nagy Gallery, New York (1957) That spring day in 1960, Hartigan knew that Price’s star was also on the rise; a very young associate professor of ...”

“... at his preparatory school writing on a classroom noticeboard ‘I REBEL’. Lambert quotes Helen Mirren as saying that ‘conservatism was the flip side of Lindsay the rebel – and for a rebel, conservatism becomes an act of rebellion.’ That’s a neat way to resolve the contradiction, but why resolve it at all? A highly polished product of a system ...”

“... of a pair of knickers. At the time – 1945 – Walton was in his late twenties, and was running a small department store in Newport, Arkansas belonging to a franchise called Ben Franklin. Walton had grown up in Missouri and attended the state university, then gone on to a clerical job during the war. He married ...”

“... working out its contours. The camera keeps arriving at a scene – a country cottage seen from a small distance, the interior of the same cottage glimpsed through its windows, a swimming pool, the pub that is about to be blown up – when nothing has yet happened there. The technique makes the very idea of seeing ominous. All we have to do is wait, and in ...”

“... show’s credit sequence – except that you can never quite read the credits: the lettering is small, and it is presented in a kind of hypnotic vortex with distracting glimpses of the story breathing behind it. The credit sequence is less information than nightmare art – a cross between Magritte and Schiele. (This is not a pipe; it’s a threat.) Lucy ...”

“... are matched by language that is (as the title of one poem has it) ‘spezzato’, broken into small bits. ‘Tu ti spezzasti,’ ‘You broke yourself into pieces,’ says Ungaretti. A former way of life is being renounced in a string of ‘nevers’ that forecast Never itself: All the rest I swear given back whole. Never again empowered. Never again a ...”

“... wearing it as a badge of honour was Carmen’s approach to life and whatever life threw at her. A small woman, she towered in others’ perceptions, and her reputation for ferocity went before her. Tributes to her (she died on 17 October) have rightly remembered her gift for friendship, her love of roses, little dogs, cricket, ‘junking’ (aka antique ...”

“... the same as the other guests who sipped Tio Pepe (medium or dry) from Lilliputian glasses and did small talk while Alexander and I handed around the shiny peanuts (bald, like the vicar) after first shovelling out fistfuls for ourselves.True, Daddy’s mother spoke with a heavy accent, recited proverbs in several languages we couldn’t understand, and sighed ...”

“... the necessities. The local boozer stood by itself round the corner from there.’) His girlfriend Helen is nowhere to be seen, and there’s no sign of her even at the novel’s end. He plays country tapes when feeling sorry for himself, makes a blind stick by cutting the head off a mop; still talking to himself in the old familiar way, he gasps for a ...”

“... She had only listened to saints. But the Rent Strikes brought her out to the world with her small fists clenched in a white-knuckle fury. Fathers were dying in trenches. Children and wives were put out on the street. Effie was sick at her Glasgow windows. And looking down she saw other women, swaying sick at their windows too. Women stood on tenement ...”

“... family were never told of the research. Dr Grey [sic] claimed the donor’s name was Helen Lane or Helen Larson (supposedly in order to protect her anonymity). In the 1970s Henrietta’s name was released and the Lacks family were shocked … to them a part of their mother is still living and is being made to ...”