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“... about him as bard of a society in cancerous decline, harkening to the Muse of Death, like the George MacBeth who saw England as The Cleaver Garden or the Blake Morrison who heard The Ballad of the Yorkshire Ripper. Yet what sets Reading apart is that he has constantly signalled that he is fascinated as much by cut-ups ...”

“... as a male concubine to this Eastern Circe.’ That is the sort of career break the Flashman of George MacDonald Fraser could have taken in his stride, but Rohmer’s males have ‘a marked streak of puritanism’ in them, saying things like ‘I had never been a woman’s man’ or ‘I was never a squire of dames.’ Their ability to keep their minds on ...”

“... those characters move. So, when the 15-year-old Ellen Terry enters the artistic colony in which George Frederic Watts is to paint and later to marry her, the narrative voice becomes a prissy, late Victorian chorus: ‘The atmosphere was curiously liberal. Surely it was not quite fitting that the guests, whatever their rank, should be treated as models for ...”

“... he wrote, and in the breast of every admirer. Invoking Milton’s Satan, or Napoleon, or George III (in a long and elaborate poem), Lowell does not so much identify with those persons as cause them to appear in a new light as Robert Lowell. Who else could they be? What else could the poets and poems taken over in Imitations be? It is significant that ...”

“... Albanians are predominantly Muslim. The Government repeatedly refers to Serb atrocities which, George Robertson teaches us, Europe has not seen the like of ‘since the Middle Ages’. Isuppose if you overlook the period 1914-45, he does have a point. Maybe it is this barbarism that excludes Kosovo from Europe? In fact, Kosovo, like anywhere else in the ...”

“... even if a line in ‘What would you do if you lost it?’ says: ‘Campion, Creeley, Anacreon, Blake I never read through.’ The kinship he claims with Blake is specious, but his relation to Whitman, if only in ‘A Supermarket in California’, is valid. At least he learned from Whitman something of the poetics of ...”

“... Hamilton(Sunday Times)Tim Heald(Now)Thomas Hinde(Sunday Telegraph)Bernard Levin(Sunday Times)Blake Morrison(TLS)John Nicholson(Times)Richard Rayner(Time Out)Anthony Thwaite(Observer)MiddlingPaul Ableman(Spectator)Peter Conrad(Harpers & Queen)Alan Hollinghurst(New Statesman)Christopher Wordsworth(Guardian)UnfavourablePaul Ableman(Spectator)Robert ...”

“... In ‘The Building of the Skyscraper’, a short poem which appeared in the Nation in 1964, George Oppen wrote: The steel worker on the girder Learned not to look down, and does his work And there are words we have learned Not to look at, Not to look for substance Below them. But we are on the verge Of vertigo. It’s hard to tell from this poem, published when Oppen was in his mid-fifties, or from any of his poems, what words he was thinking of ...”

“... is any general reluctance to tick off the dead. Dick Emery was ‘a talent sadly unfulfilled’, George Brown’s career was ‘hampered’ by ‘his explosive temperament, often aggravated by alcohol’, Enid Bagnold was ‘too fond of the great and the grand to be taken seriously by the literary establishment’. According to Enoch Powell, Nigel Birch ...”

“... Horizon. The Horizon survey, in fact, serves as a model for this new investigation. In 1946, George Orwell, Stephen Spender, Herbert Read and Julian Maclaren-Ross each testified that he could manage on £1000 a year net. V.S. Pritchett needed a bit more. Elizabeth Bowen raised a few eyebrows at the time by confessing that ‘I would like to have £3500 a ...”

“... every day of our lives, as just possibly future ages may be able to see.’ She goes on to invoke George Herbert’s ‘Love Unknown’, translating his figure of the life touched by God into secular terms: ‘But I think we should be gay in spite of it, sometimes even giddy – to make life endurable and to keep ourselves “new, tender, quick”.’ Some of ...”

“... because he was an outsider who came with nothing from nowhere and made it to the top. Robert Blake, in his groundbreaking biography of 1968, rightly challenged this view. Disraeli’s Anglo-Jewish bourgeois background was privileged enough; and even though he was an adventurer and exotic, the odds against him weren’t that heavy. When Disraeli was young ...”

“... is they’re all so plain.’ (He married a rather attractive Quaker of about his own age.) George VI should have known better. But we are all to be forgiven for having supposed, if we had ever heard of the Muggletonians, that there were none of them left, that there had been none left for two or three centuries. But we were proved wrong in 1974, when ...”

“... uncharitable interim biographies and Alan Franks, in the Times magazine of 31 March, talking of Blake Morrison’s South of the River coming out ‘just as Blair contemplates his awful decline from resourceful young bushytail to mangy endgame quarry’. But however much future historians may discover which is unknown to the commentators of the present ...”

“... he is persuaded. I think I am temperamentally a mystic, he says. He believes Wordsworth and Blake and George Fox and Philip K. Dick. But he excludes from the dimension of greater meaning the ascetic practices of the modern day. We engage in them, certainly: ‘hot yoga, ceaseless meditation, extreme fasting, various ...”