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“... ideological lineage going back to the Republican Party of the 1790s, a radical organisation led by Thomas Jefferson. The first party system gave way around 1830 to the battles of the Whigs and the Jacksonian Democrats. The emergence of today’s Republican Party during the 1850s as an open adversary of Southern ‘Slave Power’ and the advent of the Civil War ...”

“... His career began auspiciously in the early 1940s with the enthusiastic support of his hero Dylan Thomas, but the surrealism of his early collections, such as Cage without Grievance and 2ND Poems, seemed to mark him out as an oddity who could easily be ignored. The White Threshold in 1949 and The Nightfishing in 1955 made a conscious break with his earliest ...”

“... In 1912 Frost moved his family to England and met many writers, including Yeats, Pound and Edward Thomas, who would become his closest friend. Before returning to America in 1915, he wrote home with some news: ‘To be perfectly frank with you I am one of the most notable craftsmen of my time. That will transpire presently.’ In their sharp-witted ...”

“... were pronounced. Harold Cohen was ‘never to be mentioned again. He is an ignorant person’, Donald Davie was a ‘wretch’, and R.B. Kitaj ‘one of the very worst painters of the century’. When words were insufficient, Finlay’s indignation broke out in truncated sound poems (‘Agh, agh, yah, boo, ach, och, yugh, pugh, poo, pshaw and dash ...”

“... said some colleagues wouldn’t join events with the word ‘refugee’ in the programme: ‘Thomas Mann was a refugee, but we don’t remember him as a “refugee writer”. The classification is problematic.’ Two novels published in English last year reject the paradigm. The Lebanese author Hoda Barakat’s Voices of the Lost came to attention after ...”

“... Korn; Generals Peckem and Dreedle, Major ______ de Coverley, Doc Daneeka, Milo Minderbinder (the Donald Trump of black marketeers); Sergeant Towser, Dunbar, the soldier in white, Major Major (whose first and middle names are also Major, and who has been promoted to Major by an IBM processing error); Chaplain Tappman, Nurse Duckett, two agents from the ...”

“... a self-inflicted lèse-majesté. In another age, the Tower of London would be dusting down Thomas More’s old cell for him. But it would be unfair to dismiss Batten as a know-nothing stirrer, though often his behaviour does seem to fit that description: calling Islam‘a death cult’, claiming that the EU was inspired by Hitler’s plans for Europe ...”

“... Enright’s volume contained work by eight poets: Robert Conquest, D.J. Enright, Kingsley Amis, Donald Davie, John Holloway, Elizabeth Jennings, Philip Larkin and John Wain, to which list Conquest’s volume added the name of Thom Gunn. Insofar as there has ever been agreement on the matter, the Movement has been taken to consist of these nine writers. They ...”

“... of delirious associations and interpretations’, and the crazy-enough-to-be-true projections of Thomas Pynchon, Philip K. Dick, William Burroughs and J.G. Ballard (who wrote incisively about Surrealism). The afterlife of Surrealism is more active in poetry, as in the New York School of Frank O’Hara, John Ashbery and others: ‘We all “grew up ...”

“... changed everything. Major John Cartwright (who was later to advise the Manchester radicals) and Thomas Paine were influenced by the American programme in their arguments for domestic reform, Take Your Choice! and Common Sense. Yet it was the French Revolution that made the working classes begin to see universal manhood suffrage, equal representation for all ...”

“... just nine months, since the all-consuming public issue in the United States was the impeachment of Donald Trump. The trial was a giant anticlimax, of course, its proceedings lacking witnesses, its outcome predetermined. That Trump remains in the White House reminds us that there is almost no way of unseating an American president, even one manifestly unfit for ...”

“... Kirkup, one gets the impression, is a man who’s seen it all. He’s seen Guy Burgess and Donald Maclean have a drunken row, Quentin Crisp mincing the streets, Dylan Thomas in an alcoholic stupor reciting poetry in a loud voice, and much else. Including, perhaps, Wittgenstein cruising for rough trade? Surely, one ...”

“... in the agora. By Plutarch’s time, Boeotia was a provincial backwater. He ‘breathed history’, Donald Russell wrote in his 1972 study; he grasped ‘not only the splendour of it but the misery’. His wealthy, well-positioned family provided him with the finest education – in Greek rhetoric, literature and history – and gave him the opportunity to ...”

“... had yet more vast machineries at their disposal. It’s no surprise, as Plotnick points out, that Donald Trump should so obviously relish the role of digital commander. In January this year, playing dicks on the table with Kim Jong-un, Trump at one point tweeted that he, too, had a nuclear button, ‘but it is a much bigger & more powerful one than his, and ...”

“... The play concludes with the future Elizabeth I’s christening, during which her godfather, Thomas Cranmer, the archbishop of Canterbury, is inspired to prophesy:In her days every man shall eat in safety,Under his own vine, what he plants; and singThe merry songs of peace to all his neighbours:God shall be truly known; and those about herFrom her shall ...”