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“... group of teachers for him including, momentously, the composer Frank Bridge. Britten’s father, Robert, the dentist, is more mysterious. He was deeply unmusical; Basil Reeve and others thought that he had no faith in his son’s ability to make a musical career. But there is an intensely moving letter, written by ...”

“... moments, your fingers die; at its edge, the 5.5 million square mile ice-cap (twice that size in winter) calves bergs, some as big as London, the largest recorded 60 miles long, which drift through the most turbulent seas in the world; no land-based vertebrate inhabits the southernmost continent, because nothing can live on it apart from breeding penguins ...”

“... It was a misjudged conceit of Biden’s in October, for example, to warn constantly of the ‘dark winter’ of Covid-19 that is about to descend. You talk that way in the middle of a crisis when you see the light at the end; nobody likes the ferryman who ushers the dying to the land of the dead. But ‘dark winter’ was a ...”

“... and helped sustain as well as satirise the paranoia which was exacerbated by the assassinations of Robert Kennedy and Martin Luther King in 1968 and seemed to find its justification in the Watergate revelations. Richard Condon’s novel The Manchurian Candidate – an eerie anticipation published in 1959 and then turned into a Hollywood film which appeared ...”

“... home in San Francisco and mine in Cumbria. Now we’re here to pluck his route from the teeth of winter but it seems madly unfeasible. I couldn’t live in that maelstrom. A thread of waterfall near the start of the route is blowing sideways and upwards. Ed looks and looks, saying little. Then: ‘If you don’t mind, I think we’ll leave it. It doesn’t ...”

“... war when things were different but not completely, for the Nouvelle Revue Française’s Proust, a winter treat for when the ice on the Danube had turned dark grey-green, and the postman wore foot-cloths and felt boots. Why the burst of sensibility? Because during the winters, when the family were trapped in the house, it seems that for Melchior’s father the ...”

“... of the blacklisted screenwriter and playwright Donald Ogden Stewart and his journalist wife, Ella Winter. In Frognal, Sayre met Charlie Chaplin (depicted as arrogant, politically obtuse and unfunny), Paul Robeson, W.E.B. Dubois, the left-wing filmmakers Joseph Losey, Carl Foreman and Abraham Polonsky, the screenwriters Richard Collins, Ring Lardner Jr and ...”

“... The greatest long poem in modern English letters began its life, unexpectedly, in the winter of 1798, in an uncomfortable lodging in Goslar, Lower Saxony, where Wordsworth and his sister Dorothy found themselves marooned for four miserable months. The weather was terrible – it was reputedly the coldest winter of the century – and leaving town was practically impossible: ‘When we left the room where we sit we were obliged to wrap ourselves up in great coats &c in order not to suffer much pain from the transition,’ Dorothy wrote home to their brother Christopher, ‘though we only went into the next room or down stairs for a few minutes ...”

“... serious work: the anatomy of a marriage, a dissection of the 1980s. The prologue is set in the winter of 1991. We are introduced to Maureen, who runs her own thriving small business, a driving school in Milton Keynes. Meanwhile in London, her ex-husband, Charlie, a homeless alcoholic, tries to commit suicide by throwing himself in front of a lorry. He ...”

“... in a school-yard, remembering taunts of long ago. (One of his cleverest poems, ‘Quintets for Robert Morley’, is a tribute to the skills, social, psychological and physical, developed by the world’s heavyweights.) At school, works by Australian writers disappeared from the curriculum once senior classes were reached and the study became ...”

“... as it turns out, is illegal for public employees in New York State), the union leader, Robert Toussaint, was sent to jail and otherwise ‘progressive’ residents spat venom at their train conductors, platform sweepers and track-layers for daring to walk off the job. During the strike I stayed overnight at a friend’s house because commuting from ...”

“... Story’ from The Book (Wave, £21), her new collection of prose pieces, the speaker describes a winter in which she made a daily pilgrimage to observe a ‘stick of frozen butter’ through the window of a shanty belonging to ice fishermen. The butter, never used, remains a mystery to both speaker and reader. Nothing else happens, and then spring ...”

“... to his rescue. With the doctors’ aid he was able to persuade his parents to let him spend the winter of 1873-4 in Menton, and by the time he returned the family situation had calmed down. The lavish outpourings to Frances Sitwell had continued; and when she made it plain they were not to become lovers in the physical sense, he converted her into his ...”

“... Daniell wrote a pamphlet on The New Trade Unionism with a handsome Scottish radical called Robert Allan Nicol (a ‘Shelleyan type’), which, rather than discussing pickets, looked forward to ‘the union of the Souls of Mankind in a perfect Love’. Daniell had met Nicol when she was still married, during a trip to Edinburgh for medical treatment in ...”

“... following the brief Younger Dryas glaciation, had shut down the Gulf Stream for two millennia. Robert Corell, chair of the Arctic Climate Impact Assessment, scorned the prediction of a sea-level rise of up to 0.59 metres; the figure now looked like a metre at the very least, and he showed a map of what that rise would do to Egypt, the Caspian shores and ...”