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“... the early 1990s, the historian Gretchen Gerzina went to a London bookshop looking for a copy of Peter Fryer’s Staying Power: The History of Black People in Britain (1984). When she asked the shop assistant for help she was told ‘Madam, there were no black people in England before 1945.’ In fact, as David Olusoga’s remarkable book shows, people ...”

“... 55 poets, you feel, blush for it. Mostly they contradict it. The style of interesting poets like Peter Didsbury, John Ash, Pauline Stainer and one of the editors, Michael Hulse, is not particularly ‘democratic’, but playfully enigmatic and donnish. There is a tendency to think aloud with a somewhat creaky jauntiness, as if the poets were sharing secrets ...”

“... which correspond to a little less than half of the published text: 44 per cent, according to Peter Davison’s estimate. These have now been published in an opulent edition: the right-hand pages of the book give a full-size photograph of the material, the left-hand pages contain Professor Davison’s transcription, laboriously deciphered, the cancellings ...”

“... the SDP was hardly more than a creature of the media – ‘the BBC is now the voice of Shirley Williams and Roy Jenkins’ – it might seem that the future would lie with the Left, once the power of the media had been broken. It was in this spirit that Benn launched his bid for the deputy leadership, as his contribution to the permanent revolution needed ...”

“... Thirties, Gielgud was able to put into practice some of the lessons he had learned from Harcourt Williams at the Old Vic, and through Harcourt Williams from Granville Barker. These were simple productions with continuity of action and unity of design, and were entirely modern in feeling. Wardle quotes Tyrone Guthrie as ...”

“... essayists and tellers of unpopular truths, and now, spurred by the appearance four years ago of Peter Davison’s marvellously thorough complete edition of Orwell’s writings (and no doubt with an eye on Orwell’s centenary, which falls this year), he has written a short book entirely devoted to telling us, as the title of the US edition has it, ‘Why ...”

“... watch it, will find himself taken up by the Modern Painters crowd, the disciples of the late Peter Fuller. As a high-profile poet with atrophied tastes, he can expect a commission to do something tasteful on Glynn Williams. The Commander has become the ashy residue of Neo-Romanticism, out there in the Fens, a John ...”

“... In 1948, Tennessee Williams published a short story (and collection of the same title) called ‘One Arm’. It is about Oliver Winemiller, a magnificent young navy boxer who lost an arm in a car crash when he was 18, and whose life has subsequently gone to ruin. Working as a male hustler, he services thousands of men in cities throughout America ...”

“... would end in marriage. It did not. She married instead a 30-year-old advertising copywriter called Peter Porter. He was an Australian immigrant in London, and had written a lot of poems, but published relatively few; she was a nurse who seemed ‘very English’ in accent and tastes, and was admired for having a figure like a ballet dancer. They set up home ...”

“... to the second volume of their Oxford Critical and Cultural History of Modernist Magazines, Peter Brooker and Andrew Thacker point out that the nine-year run of the Dial alone amounts to ‘around 10,500 pages of text and 1200 pages of adverts, assuming an average of 300 words per page; this equals some 3.1 million words to read … about equivalent to ...”

“... others) have called me a ‘right-wing socialist’ (Michael Foot) and ‘social democratic’ (Peter Sedgwick), perhaps not noticing that I, too, have been on a long journey, affected by Orwell as well as studying him (he does exemplify the non-Marxist ‘English socialist’ tradition, like Tawney, Cole and Foot himself). Many of us have been influenced ...”

“... in Love enjoyed mass appeal in Victorian England. One fatuous confection by Robert Folkestone Williams, The Youth of Shakespeare, went through six editions in three countries, besides being translated into German, and the author was encouraged by its success to complete a Shakespearean trilogy. Since, as Helen Gardner says, ‘the facts that are clearly ...”

“... liturgical cup, arm rings and what’s called ‘hack silver’. Sunhild Kleingärtner and Gareth Williams carefully point out in the accompanying text that the hoard represents ‘long-distance trade … gift-giving and social exchange’, but it looks a lot like loot. Its owner never came back for it. What happened to him? Some believe the far larger ...”

“... and more plentiful. ‘O God the bottomless tedium of Dostoevsky ... his Russian salad-ness, his Peter-the-Great-would-have-loved-it-ness, his Catharine-loved-being-whipped-why-shouldn’t-you-ness at all times, his lead-me-to-the-Urals-ness, his Hells-eggs-why-aren’t-you-terrified-ness – he is too interested in the reader to be a good writer.’ There ...”

“... bouts of violence and religious mania. At times ‘the combined efforts of de Sade and Tennessee Williams couldn’t have done justice’ to the scene. Tony attacked Barbara (and her mother) several times before he killed her. Unfortunately fearlessness was her outstanding virtue. The last act of the tragedy in New York would not have happened if Tony had ...”