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“... of bards. He has disappeared from fame. When we see him clinging to the pieces of his broken craft, close to extinction, the fate of the poem itself is in the balance. He alone carries with him the account of his exiguous history. Without Odysseus, the Odyssey is sunk. The contrast with the Iliad and the Argonautica could not be more profound. The ...”

“... Putting on again joyously the hateful harness’. That is how Robert Pinget’s diffident and slightly dotty narrator, Monsieur Songe, describes the process of taking up his pen yet again, and adding one more to an already considerable cavalcade of novels.* Then he crosses out the word ‘hateful’. And then he crosses out the word ‘harness ...”

“... attack on the day War Loans were nationalised in 1917. And he was no less stingy in his literary craft. He wasted no time, for example, in describing nature. ‘It was one of those dawns that Turgenev describes so inimitably,’ one could read among the other pearls of the general’s pen. No such ill-worn banalities will do for the excitable ...”

“... object. As he remarked one day, ‘It was an excellent question of my lady Cotton, when Sir Robert Cotton was magnifying of a shoe, which was Mose’s or Noah’s, and wondering at the strange shape and fashion of it: But Mr Cotton, says she, are you sure it is a shoe?’ The 20th-century art historian Martin Kemp has spent his life reconstructing the ...”

“... degree by which he must analyse it privately in writing it; only a writer very confident in his craft, very confident in his readers and, most of all, deeply interested in the snick and swing of tense shift could get away with the opening of the 1993 story ‘Comet’: Philip married Adele on a day in June. It was cloudy and the wind was blowing. Later the ...”

“... narrowboats. One of these, the most piratical, proudly flying its Jolly Roger, is a coffin-sized craft belonging to a researcher called Mike Wells. He has made it his business, despite numerous brushes with security guards and large dogs, to record and report every stage of the recent enclosures. He helped to commission two substantial scientific reports on ...”

“... 11, leaving the family $8 after funeral expenses had been paid. Frost’s mother, Isabelle, took Robert and his sister east from San Francisco to Lawrence, Massachusetts, where they lived initially with her parents-in-law before Isabelle tried – with mixed results – to hold down a job as a teacher. Frost was many things before he was a poet; by the time ...”

“... Yes, I do. His conflation of the historian’s mastery of ideas with an artist’s mastery of his craft is typical. But it would be a poor spirit who could mark the book down on rational analysis and ignore its proper virtues. If we can’t altogether accept the claims of his literary Muse, who allows him some felicities – ...”

“... self-made, something which delighted Katherine Anne Porter. ‘She has never studied the writing craft in any college. She has never belonged to a literary group ... Nothing else that I know about her could be more satisfactory to me than this.’ Despite Welty’s prompt adoption by Robert Penn Warren and the Southern ...”

“... British sense of humour. Both idolised Sid Field, and learned some of the basic lessons of their craft from watching him at work. Williams caught him at the London Palladium in January 1948. ‘It was a rotten variety bill, with far too many acrobatic affairs,’ he wrote, but added: ‘Sid Field was marvellous, and received terrific and well-merited ...”

“... and indeed he consistently raises interesting questions concerning the distinctions between craft, industry and art. He announces in the preface that he is not concerned to evaluate Victorian sculpture, adding, however, that it is possible that he has ‘nonetheless’ not ‘entirely succeeded in concealing personal sympathies’. In the concluding ...”

“... him from imposing such garish humiliations. Or they may be what his American studies in the craft have taught him to leave out. There seems to be a rule against seeming to be excited by a situation. A good instance is the story ‘Vitamins’ in Cathedral. The narrator has ‘a nothing job’ and his wife sells vitamins from door to door. He goes on a ...”

“... the British reoccupied the East India Company’s settlement in Calcutta. In June a force led by Robert Clive deposed Siraj after defeating him in a battle near Plassey (Palashi), helped by the defection of the nawab’s key advisers and financial backers to the British side. The first account of the ‘Black Hole’ – as the room where the soldiers were ...”

“... of independence from political control. Unlike Trump, who tried to fire the former special counsel Robert Mueller, Biden has made no attempt to breach this norm. Federal convictions differ from state convictions in one further, striking way: as Debs learned, federal convicts can be pardoned by the president, while state prisoners can be pardoned only though a ...”

“... concerned – one of the lightest-fingered authors living). In this case, the borrowings are from Robert Aldrich’s Whatever happened to Baby Jane? and John Fowles’s The Collector. A best-selling author, Paul Sheldon, crashes in a desolate area of the Rockies. It is winter, his car is buried in the snow, and his broken body is rescued by an eccentric ...”