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“... again.’ Sandbrook’s touch is sure on those cultural areas which are clearly to his taste (from Philip Larkin via James Bond to Dad’s Army); his own affections lead him to spot nostalgia in places you wouldn’t immediately expect to find it. However, his tastes and affections contribute to a thesis which is in itself suspect, and whose generalities are ...”

“... another advantage that might benefit the family. More than a century later, in 1754, 13-year-old Philip Quaque, a Fante of royal birth, was sent to London for the same reasons: he became the first African to be ordained a priest in the Church of England. John Naimbanna, the son of a Temne ruler in what is now Sierra Leone, arrived in Britain in 1791. He ...”

“... Stalinist as no one wants to be the first to stop clapping. Coming out I find myself behind Simon Williams, who has been mentioned by his son as one of Ben’s closest friends and am cheered by the possibility that if Ben could play Ambrose, so could Simon – which happily he does. But ‘lovely Ben’ the overwhelming feeling.24 February. Watching Dad’s ...”

“... such a thing as a pure Americanness in poetry. Earlier ‘Redskin’ poets such as William Carlos Williams sought to achieve it, probably, in contradistinction from the European corruptions of men like Eliot. But I find it much more strongly represented in such a post-Eliot poet as John Ashbery, who seems to me a true poet of distraction. The back cover of ...”

“... beginning that he would not be able to write poetry, Jarrell by August 1944 was writing to Oscar Williams: ‘If anybody can write a good poem about anything, he ought to do it about a war he’s in.’ Two months later, in Tucson, Arizona, he wrote to a friend: I’ve been wonderfully lucky for the past six months – my job and Tucson are swell, Mackie ...”

“... can be publicly disclosed. Philby makes an appearance in The Baby Sitters and a thinly disguised Philip Agee in Moscow Gold. Both put Ellison onto important leads. As with the Bond books, Salisbury delivers the requisite doses of sex, sadism and snobbery; there is much good living, genitals encounter genitals and genitals encounter electrodes at regular ...”

“... Jennifer Terry has a gift in the popular columnist and self-described ‘motherless’ man Philip Wylie, who coined the term ‘momism’ to describe the American mother’s dominating influence over her children, particularly her sons, and whose bestselling book Generation of Vipers (1942) blamed ‘megaloid momworship’ for most of the problems of ...”

“... and then at Queen’s; his literary life with Seamus Deane, Derek Mahon, Michael and Edna Longley, Philip Hobsbaum, and the workshop that Hobsbaum convened, the Group; and the grisly metamorphoses of Northern Irish public life, from simmering inequality and half-suppressed resentment into the worst of the Troubles. Each of these developments affected ...”

“... has never occurred to him’); a haunting, repeated definition of Hell borrowed from Charles Williams (‘nobody is ever sent to hell; he, or she, insists on going there’). There is a letter to the Sunday Times correcting the suggestion that Auden had snubbed Guy Burgess when he was in disgrace. It was true, Auden said, that he had been out when ...”

“... people!’ The usual suspects, or most of them, were on board – Stevens, Eliot, Crane, Pound, Williams, there was even a poem of Lowell’s – but not with their standard anthology pieces. About 80 per cent of Thom’s choices either had Eros in the title or were directly concerned with the troublesome deity. Nearly half the poets in the collection were ...”

“... was ‘a Cambridge passion for Eng. Lit… . combined with a rather taking bully-boy strut’. Philip Hobsbaum, also alert to Gunn, took the view that the poem ‘Carnal Knowledge’ was ‘slick’ and ‘execrable’. Alvarez, as Wootten notes, reviewed Gunn’s first book twice. In one review, he called the collection ‘for my money, the most ...”

“... in Stockholm on 12 June, in the presence of the queens of Sweden and England, as well as Prince Philip, Princess Margaret and members of the Swedish royal family. Sargent was in his element, the concert was a triumph, and he received a great ovation. But Sargent’s greatest and most sustained efforts went into the Promenade Concerts, where he eventually ...”

“... have ever been settled. Whether arranged alphabetically by first line, like The ‘Garland’ of Philip, or by subject and date, like Verse and Worse and The Stuffed Owl, the Anthology has always seemed less than the sum of its parts. Indeed its Byzantine title concedes a pleasing serendipity: anthoi, logia, ‘a gathering of flowers’. The Elizabethans may ...”

“... In the Loop. How quickly Blair’s pose became exposed. As early as June 2000, his pet pollster Philip Gould was reporting their focus groups as saying that ‘TB is not believed to be real. He lacks conviction, he is all spin and presentation.’ It is a bitter irony that this image of him became fixed in the public mind just as he was beginning to embark ...”

“... lectures – would have to unpack this. Properties were carefully inventoried by the theatre owner Philip Henslowe; a great deal of cost and labour went into the crowns, dragons and wrought gloves used in plays. Props, in any case, can be articulate about ownership, as when Lear divides up Britain by tracing lines on a map. When Maus writes about the ...”