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Stefan Collini: The Movement, 25 June 2009

The Movement Reconsidered: Essays on Larkin, Amis, Gunn, Davie and Their Contemporaries 
edited by Zachary Leader.
Oxford, 336 pp., £18.99, May 2009, 978 0 19 955825 4
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... the 1950s, edited by D.J. Enright, appeared in 1955, followed a year later by New Lines, edited by Robert Conquest. 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 ...

Retro-Selfies

Iain Sinclair: Ferlinghetti, 17 December 2015

I Greet You at the Beginning of a Great Career: The Selected Correspondence of Lawrence Ferlinghetti and Allen Ginsberg, 1955–97 
edited by Bill Morgan.
City Lights, 284 pp., £11.83, July 2015, 978 0 87286 678 2
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Writing across the Landscape: Travel Journals 1960-2010 
by Lawrence Ferlinghetti, edited by Giada Diano and Matthew Gleeson.
Liveright, 464 pp., £22.99, October 2015, 978 1 63149 001 9
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... features none of the planetary collisions, the cheek-chewing grand guignol of the legend of Ted Hughes and Sylvia Plath. There are no treaties with dark gods to be unpacked into conspiracy files and no shamanic visitations from crows and reeking foxes. Two ambitious young or youngish American men operating out of the same city, San Francisco, forge an ...

Seedy Equations

Adam Mars-Jones: Dealing with James Purdy, 18 May 2023

James Purdy: Life of a Contrarian Writer 
by Michael Snyder.
Oxford, 444 pp., £27, January, 978 0 19 760972 9
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... conservative Midwestern town, but there is no follow-up on this broad hint. The youngest brother, Robert, stayed in Ohio. James described him as a ‘Babbitt’ – a smug materialist. He too was a published author, though his book was called The Successful High School Athletic Programme. Purdy remarked that if Robert or ...

Bunfights

Paul Foot, 7 March 1991

Memoirs of a Libel Lawyer 
by Peter Carter Ruck.
Weidenfeld, 293 pp., £20, November 1990, 0 297 81022 7
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... properly) advised by his lawyers to settle for £5000. The barrister who advised him was Robert McCartney QC. Mr McCartney had recently won a celebrated libel action in Belfast against the Sunday World. The paper had alleged, falsely, that Mr McCartney and another barrister had had a row in a café over the last available cream bun. This report, the ...

Private Nutshells

Janette Turner Hospital, 4 August 1994

Debatable Land 
by Candia McWilliam.
Bloomsbury, 216 pp., £15.99, June 1994, 0 7475 1708 8
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... and of reconstructions-from-afar is evoked in the novel’s epigraph from the famously unsettled Robert Louis Stevenson: The tropics vanish, and meseems that I, From Halkerside, from topmost Allmuir, Or steep Caerketton; dreaming gaze again.                         Songs of Travel This is the nature of the voyage for the Scots on ...

The Excursions

Andrew O’Hagan, 16 June 2011

... Keats walked this coast he felt it followed him,’ I said. But our plans involved Robert Burns. Karl, since he first began publishing Seamus in the New Statesman in the 1960s, always felt there was a clear affinity between Burns and Heaney. They were both the sons of farmers and they both allowed nature to oxygenate the mind and inflect the ...

Dysfunctional Troglodytes with Mail-Order Weaponry

Iain Sinclair: Edward Dorn, 11 April 2013

Collected Poems 
by Edward Dorn.
Carcanet, 995 pp., £25, November 2012, 978 1 84777 126 1
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... Roundhouse, the former engine-turning shed. Stuart Montgomery, the publisher of Gunslinger (and of Robert Duncan, Gary Snyder, Basil Bunting, David Jones and Roy Fisher), a wispy-moustached medical man with a significant hobby, decided to do something about the sluggishness and indolence of mainstream critics. He flew off to Las Vegas and took a cab to the ...

Elegant Extracts

Leah Price: Anthologies, 3 February 2000

The Oxford Book of English Verse 
edited by Christopher Ricks.
Oxford, 690 pp., £25, October 1999, 0 19 214182 1
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The Norton Anthology of English Literature: Volume One 
edited by M.H. Abrams and Stephen Greenblatt.
Norton, 2974 pp., £22.50, December 1999, 0 393 97487 1
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The Norton Anthology of English Literature: Volume Two 
edited by M.H. Abrams and Stephen Greenblatt.
Norton, 2963 pp., £22.50, February 2000, 9780393974911
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The Longman Anthology of British Literature: Volume One 
edited by David Damrosch.
Longman, 2963 pp., $53, July 1999, 0 321 01173 2
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The Longman Anthology of British Literature: Volume Two 
edited by David Damrosch.
Longman, 2982 pp., $53, July 1999, 0 321 01174 0
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Night & Horses & The Desert: An Anthology of Classical Arabic Literature 
edited by Robert Irwin.
Allen Lane, 480 pp., £25, September 1999, 0 7139 9153 4
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News that Stays News: The 20th Century in Poems 
edited by Simon Rae.
Faber, 189 pp., £9.99, October 1999, 0 571 20060 5
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Time’s Tidings: Greeting the 21st Century 
by Carol Ann Duffy.
Anvil, 157 pp., £7.95, November 1999, 0 85646 313 2
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Scanning the Century: The Penguin Book of the 20th Century in Poetry 
edited by Peter Forbes.
Penguin, 640 pp., £12.99, February 1999, 9780140588996
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... for ‘nine-tenths of the reading of the reading public’. When, in 1928, Laura Riding and Robert Graves’s Pamphlet against Anthologies charged the genre with reducing poetry to a ‘packet-commodity’, the only alternative that they proposed revealed just how inescapable the anthology had become. The ‘full Corpus’ that could drive anthologies ...

Unmuscular Legs

E.S. Turner, 22 August 1996

The Dictionary of National Biography 1986-1990 
edited by C.S. Nicholls.
Oxford, 607 pp., £50, June 1996, 0 19 865212 7
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... feet and inches, as for police records. Moira Shearer had rich material to go on in Sir Robert Helpmann, with his ‘bulging forehead and wide protruding eyes’, narrow shoulders, large diaphragm and ‘thin unmuscular legs’; fine for balletic and dramatic roles, but ‘in modern dress he seemed too fantastic to be believable’. Lord David ...

English Fame and Irish Writers

Brian Moore, 20 November 1980

Selected Poems 1956-1975 
by Seamus Heaney.
Faber, 136 pp., £3.95, October 1980, 0 571 11644 2
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Preoccupations: Selected Prose 1968-1978 
by Seamus Heaney.
Faber, 224 pp., £7.95, October 1980, 0 571 11638 8
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... to those critics of poetry who simply follow current fashions. He possesses in a high degree what Robert Lowell called ‘the grace of accuracy’, and his work often echoes those early Irish nature poems he admires – poetry which, as he points out, belonged to a tradition which did not undergo Romance influences and which ‘registers certain sensations ...

Building an Empire

J. Hoberman: Oscar Micheaux, 19 July 2001

Writing Himself into History: Oscar Micheaux, His Silent Films and His Audiences 
by Pearl Bowser and Louise Spence.
Rutgers, 280 pp., £38.95, August 2000, 0 8135 2803 8
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Straight Lick: The Cinema of Oscar Micheaux 
by J. Ronald Green.
Indiana, 368 pp., £21.95, August 2000, 0 253 33753 4
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... in general to blame its victims. Literary historians have little sympathy for him. Carl Milton Hughes writes that Micheaux ‘attempts to be a serious writer, but he hardly has the creative imagination and misses the reality of things by his theatrical posturing’; Robert Bone attacks Micheaux’s work for having ...

How to get on in the new Iraq

Carol Brightman: James Baker’s drop-the-debt tour, 4 March 2004

... Baker, who may be representing his law firm, Baker Botts, which represents Halliburton; or Baker Hughes, the oil services company that was promised the second tier of oil-field restoration contracts in Iraq after Halliburton’s engineering and construction subsidiary KBR; or the Carlyle Group, the Washington-based global investment firm, of which Baker is ...

Waiting for the Poetry

Ange Mlinko: Was Adrienne Rich a poet?, 15 July 2021

The Power of Adrienne Rich: A Biography 
by Hilary Holladay.
Doubleday, 416 pp., £25, November 2020, 978 0 385 54150 3
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Of Woman Born: Motherhood as Experience and Institution 
by Adrienne Rich.
Norton, 345 pp., £13.99, May 2021, 978 0 393 54142 7
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... path to early success, particularly her mentor, Ted Morrison, who got her invited to dinner with Robert Frost (Rich charmed him) and who groomed her for the Yale Younger Poets competition judged by Auden, which she won in 1950. The prize put her on the map. A Change of World, published the following year, garnered respectful reviews; she shone at public ...

Hate, Greed, Lust and Doom

Sean O’Faolain, 16 April 1981

William Faulkner: His Life and Work 
by David Minter.
Johns Hopkins, 325 pp., £9.50, January 1981, 0 8018 2347 1
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... movement is now probably best remembered by the outstanding writers associated with it, such as Robert Penn Warren (All the King’s Men), John Crowe Ransom, Allen Tate, even Robert Lowell, who literally pitched his tent on Tate’s lawn. All of these must have responded warmly to ...

Excusez-moi

Ian Hamilton, 1 October 1987

The Haw-Lantern 
by Seamus Heaney.
Faber, 52 pp., £7.95, June 1987, 0 571 14780 1
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... did not at first seem to offer much of a challenge to anything, or anyone – he was too like Ted Hughes, minus the Lawrentian, black-magical ingredients, and he was a shade too youthfully delighted with the plopping, slopping, thwacking sounds of spade on soil, or milk in pail, etc. (Donnish critics have always loved this onomatopoeic side of ...

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