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“... the genre demands it. The Modern American Novel is an ‘Opus Book’ (General Editors – Keith Thomas, Alan Ryan, Peter Medawar) intended for students. The Literature of the United States is a volume in the Macmillan History of Literature. But no Oxford undergraduate could get by with generalities like this aperçu of Professor Walker’s: ‘Jewish novels ...”

“... of the time, before pharaohs and pyramids, when everything was still to come’: the Miami-born Donald Justice found the passage in Henry James for me at the beginning of my time here. ‘Saigon, 1969,’ my friend Larry Joseph said, when I sat him in Leonardo’s coffee bar a block away from campus. ‘Fucking Yucatan,’ I called it, not dismissively but ...”

“... for the material culture of classical antiquity, which Wedgwood and his business partner, Thomas Bentley, expertly harnessed. Turning away from the more flamboyantly decorated styles in which he had previously worked, including teapots in the shape of cauliflowers, Wedgwood began to emulate ancient vases, cameos and sarcophagi. He raided ...”

“... Well: the poems were lying about, & I did not quite know what to do with them,’ Thomas Hardy wrote to Edmund Gosse shortly after the publication of his first collection, Wessex Poems (1898). ‘It is difficult,’ he went on, ‘to let people who think I have made a fresh start know that to indulge in rhymes was my original weakness, & the prose only an afterthought ...”

“... press; and of Hovis, Peak Freans and Huntley and Palmers. When Edward VII went to sea with Sir Thomas Lipton, it was noted with surprise that the King ‘had gone yachting with his grocer’; when the first J.J. Sainsbury died, his last words were, reputedly: ‘Keep the shops well lit.’ ‘To be conscious of our forefathers as they really were and, bit ...”

“... the Egyptian authorities have made the fight against smuggling and trafficking their priority,’ Donald Tusk said. ‘As a result there have been no irregular departures from Egypt to Europe this year.’ For Brussels, Sisi’s waxing authoritarianism appears a small price to pay for his perfect record in policing migration in a country with rampant ...”

“... great powers for good they could exercise for the benefit of large numbers of people. Why else did Donald Macnabb, a district officer in the Punjab, build an irrigation canal with his own money? Why else did officials work in the famine and plague camps, burying corpses after the sweepers had fled, losing their health and sometimes their lives in an attempt to ...”

“... in elaborate outdoor scenarios.Fishing has been the subject of some fine writing: Thomas McGuane’s The Longest Silence, Luke Jennings’s Blood Knots, Norman Maclean’s A River Runs through It, which begins: ‘In our family there was no clear line between religion and fly fishing.’ Tom Fort’s Casting Shadows: Fish and Fishing in ...”

“... it still takes what Hegel described as the valet’s perspective on the future of the continent. Thomas Meaney GreeceTwo years ago, David Cameron saw himself out of office, respecting the result of the referendum he had unwisely called. For three years now, Alexis Tsipras has clung to power in Athens by disrespecting the results of his own referendum. The ...”

“... new biography, enter his trance, and suddenly transform himself uninhibitedly into Mickey or Donald or an owl or an old hunting dog . . . ‘He would imitate the expressions of the dog, and look from one side to the other, and raise first one brow and then the other’ . . . ‘You’d have the feeling of the whole thing,’ Dick Huemer ...”

“... curiously, only 21 are included here) have been compared by Robert Nye to the poems written by Thomas Hardy after the death of his wife, and by Jonathan Raban to In Memoriam. The subject is a precarious one for poetry, and Dunn has not always succeeded in avoiding the pitfalls. Poems like ‘Dining’ and ‘Arrangements’ are dangerously direct; Dunn’s ...”

“... out: ‘Look at me! … Don’t you think I’m beautiful?’ In fact, she thought he looked like Donald Duck, and insisted he put his clothes on and take her to meet André Breton. ‘There has only been one really good edition of anything that Shakespeare wrote,’ he told the writer Ruthven Todd, ‘and that is an edition of Venus and Adonis that I did ...”

“... is no longer there except as an intuition or perhaps a fiction: Shelley charms the star into what Thomas Hardy – a great admirer though a very different sort of poet – once called ‘existlessness’. And, to add to the sense of abstraction, this is a metaphor for a metaphor, since Shelley is likening the dwindling star to the soaring skylark, a bird ...”

“... difficulty of finding servants, staying with Max Beerbohm, the Test series, his first meeting with Thomas Hardy, the shortcomings of his wife/son/daughter-in-law, his neglect by the critics – this last a recurring theme. ‘They don’t understand what a talent I have for light verse.’ He had no pudeur about expressing his resentments or his ...”

“... the most gifted editor in television. He hunted down giants for Monitor – Henry Moore, Sir Thomas Beecham, E.M. Forster, Max Ernst, Robert Graves. He had the fine, if expensive idea of filming the artist or administrator in a setting germane to his or her work. They went to Athens to profile Katina Paxinou, to the Metropolitan Opera in New York to ...”