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“... or sold off as an ice-rink or storage facility. Seen from Canary Wharf, down the length of a wet grey street (containing nothing but a cab rank and a couple of security men in scrambled-egg vests), the Dome was a spacecraft standing in for all the missing liners and cargo boats from nostalgic black and white photographs. It was an unoptioned metaphor with ...”

“... exception that proves the rule. ‘It was that I had no gift. I had no natural talent,’ he tells Stephen Schiff in a recent New Yorker profile. ‘I had to learn it. Having to learn it, I became my own man.’ And, in A Way in the World: ‘I had had to learn to write from scratch, almost in the way a man has to learn to walk and use his body again after a ...”

“... is a thing that happened here. I just buried a young girl whose name was Stephanie, named for St Stephen, the patron of stonemasons, the first martyr. She died when she was struck by a cemetery marker as she slept in the back scat of her parents’ van as the family was driving down the interstate on their way to Georgia. It was the middle of the night. The ...”

“... dip instead. I feel happy, enormous faces, hooked noses, black beards with a sprinkling of grey, I think of many things, good-bye dead men. The tsaddik’s face, his nickel-rimmed pince-nez.   ‘Where are you from young man?’   ‘From Odessa.’   ‘How is life there?’   ‘People live.’   ‘And here it’s a ...”

“... I’m inky, threaded with spectra, gynaecological Eyeball thistle-tassels of the sea Brown, blue-grey, single-cell-like Pre-embryo materials in store But never used, spermatozoic spirits Haunt the sunned waters, séances of plankton lie Paperweight-still, flower-heads, floating marbles Undulating in slow liquid glass I am too antisyzygously Scottish, Thirled ...”

“... to his discovery: ‘Wars are only a means of publicising the thing already accomplished.’ Stephen Kern has pointed out that the Cubist quality of camouflage was quite widely perceived during the war. The artist Lucien-Victor Guirand de Scévola, who was one of the forces behind France’s camouflage initiative, claimed to have used Cubist means to ...”

“... late E.H. Carr and the warmth for it expressed by historian-reformers in the Soviet Union and by Stephen Cohen in the USA. The merit of Reiman’s book lies elsewhere. E.H. Carr, whatever one thinks of his general analysis (and readers of this journal will be aware that his heritage is contentious), pioneered the study of early Soviet institutions. Reiman ...”

“... only had a few hours’ sleep. I’m hysterical. Is this what it’s like to be famous? No wonder Stephen Fry tried to escape across the Channel. The woman in charge of the television programme rings up. Would I be prepared to take a phone-in from women suffering from breast cancer? I say I’m not too keen on the idea as I’m not medically qualified and ...”

“... Jarrell’s concern for the helpless or voiceless or overlooked has elicited from critics such as Stephen Burt and Langdon Hammer and James Longenbach favourable comparisons with the predatory, will-to-power poetics of Lowell, or the rampant self-aggrandising confessionalism of Berryman and Plath. Assessments of Jarrell as a poet inevitably play him off ...”

“... Back in 1975 the SNP’s arguments were diametrically opposite. The party’s leading strategist, Stephen Maxwell, argued a few weeks before the 1975 referendum that ‘a No vote here against a Yes vote in England would be ideal … This is our great opportunity to further Scotland’s cause.’ The SNP gloried, then as now, in the possibility of a Scotland ...”

“... friends and colleagues of Professor Barton, ranging from American luminaries like Jonas Barish and Stephen Orgel to newcomers like Richard Rowland (who contributes a thumpingly good piece on Heywood). Shakespeare is still the most challenging object in the literary canon, the most generous with meaning and, at the same time, the most apt to find out folly in ...”

“... revolution wasn’t just for women. Mod fashion was so changeable and lucrative that in 1964 John Stephen could set up the John Stephen Custom Made Shop in Soho’s Carnaby Street, where customers’ own designs were run up for them on the premises. By 1966, Carnaby Street was overrun with ‘buyers from the more staid ...”

“... between Chang, her mother and the rest of her family. Chang asked her literary executors, Stephen and Mae Fong Soong, to destroy the manuscript of Little Reunions. They didn’t publish it, but they didn’t destroy it either. After the Soongs died, the burden fell on their son Roland. Like Max Brod, he made the decision not to obey the author’s ...”

“... on one cover and the reservoir dogs of the Labour front bench on the other. Uniform dark grey suits (no pinstripes), blue plastic helmets, heavy-duty wellies and – apart from John Prescott – full zip millennial grins. Showcased by a long-focus lens that tactfully blurs the background of industrial dereliction. Britain is Working. Handson ...”

“... Nussbaum? Her face, with the nose squashed in, the lips split, the eyes unmatched, the hair a grey frizz with missing clumps, is the first unassimilable icon that this trial produced. Hedda’s battered face stared out from the cover of Newsweek, from the Metropolitan section of the New York Times, from every TV channel. New York, ‘so familiar with the ...”