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“... the Middle East, but to no avail). In his absence, working with Tory Blairites like Cameron and Michael Gove seemed a safer bet than with a Labour Party in which the Blairites like Adonis and Mandelson were on the way out, and Miliband Minor and Balls were taking over. During the negotiations, Nick Clegg, Chris Huhne, Danny ...”

“... exceptions, no crossovers, no poets who manage to be both with and without history? There is one: Alexander Blok, ‘a pure lyricist who did have development and history and a path’. But then Tsvetaeva corrects herself almost immediately. ‘Development’ is not the word she wants. ‘Development presupposes harmony. Can there be a development which is ...”

“... with electronically produced sounds’, on which she collaborated with the downbeat Scottish poet Alexander Trocchi, Delia Derbyshire – the maven of early electronica – and others, and which features Tonks’s cut-glass accent enunciating over warblings from another world. One of the poems included in the montage is ‘Orpheus in Soho’, in which she ...”

“... case he makes for Shakespeare’s skill at portraying women. He is also interestingly troubled by Alexander Pope, whose technique is so impressive but whose morality is non-existent. All of de Quincey’s criticism is answerable to the charge of being minor, and eccentric, but for the historian of criticism, his place in the reaction, via German ...”

“... defeated Cade, leaving the woods in which he has taken refuge, breaks into the garden of the loyal Alexander Iden, who proves to be his nemesis; the rebel dies pronouncing his curse on a garden that stands as an emblem for the entire kingdom about to be laid waste. Irish woodkerne make one more appearance in Shakespeare, in a play concerned with dark magic, as ...”

“... grotto-builders by the time of the countess. It is impossible not to associate the grotto built by Alexander Pope under his villa in Twickenham between 1720 and 1725, for instance, with the Cave of Spleen in The Rape of the Lock (1712-17), home of the goddess of bad moods and sick fancies:Here in a grotto, shelter’d close from air,And screen’d in shades ...”

“... taste of his own, Haitink became the victim of those who had to decide things for him. In Michael Waldman’s unsparing television documentary The House, the hapless Haitink is seen to be flabbergasted as the head of the opera company, Nicholas Payne, tries to sell him the director Richard Jones’s scheme for the Ring. In Die Walküre Fricka would ...”

“... on, but then skirts. The historical novel – if we except its one great precursor, Kleist’s Michael Kohlhaas – is a product of romantic nationalism. This is as true of Tolstoy as it is of Scott, Cooper, Manzoni, Galdós, Jókai, Sienkiewicz or so many others. The original matrix of this nationalism was the European reaction against Napoleonic ...”

“... have been much more welcoming to younger scholars, thanks mainly to the friendly attitude of Alexander James, the present literary executor. Many bestridees seem to have continued to assume that the Colossal labour has done it all, but a few have emerged from the shadow and achieved some stature of their own: Jean Strouse in Alice James: A Biography ...”

“... display something of an Establishment bias that reflects the influence of Ronald Reagan and Alexander Haig, who, from the outset, identified philosophically and geopolitically with Mrs Thatcher’s cause. They had their own good reasons for doing so. After all, Mrs Thatcher had taken the initiative among European leaders in supporting the US policy of ...”

“... stretches from Hölderlin to Rilke and Celan. Unlike them, however, he is little known in Britain. Michael Hamburger’s translations established Hölderlin and Celan in English, but he was less fortunate with Trakl, and Decline, his pamphlet of 1952, was not reprinted. There was a larger selection by James Wright and Robert Bly in 1961; and Hamburger’s ...”

“... of the mediocre short stories from which equally mediocre horror films have been made; and Michael Howell and Peter Ford’s The True History of the Elephant Man. The best of the lot is the last, a well-researched and level-headed biography that tells us considerably more about Joseph Merrick than we knew before. For example: Treves recorded that he ...”

“... By​ the time his first opera, The Midsummer Marriage, had its premiere at Covent Garden in 1955, Michael Tippett was considered, alongside Benjamin Britten, the most significant and original British composer of his generation. Yet he was also the natural outsider in a scene that as well as Britten (born 1913), included William Walton (1902) and Lennox Berkeley (1903), with the reassuring presence of Ralph Vaughan Williams (1872) hovering over them all ...”

“... Donat was keen to do The Polyglots as a film, but eventually decided that ‘only Hollywood or Alexander Korda could do justice to the story.’ Basil Dean, who had filmed The Constant Nymph, was enthusiastic as well, but that too came to nothing. Dr Davies never claims too much for Gerhardie’s achievement and reputation; her scholarship has produced an ...”

“... the Central Committee voted for freezing. By that time the body had decayed to such an extent that Alexander Pasternak, an architect and the brother of the poet, recorded nine different tones of decomposed flesh in a watercolour painting he made of the corpse. The embalming team, led by Vladimir Vorobiov, a professor of anatomy from Kharkov, removed Lenin’s ...”