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“... have paid them homage: the history of music, art, poetry. Dada or Surrealism; the Sex Pistols or Michael Jackson; the Situationist International or – well, if nothing bears comparison with it, few would have any trouble establishing the scale on which to measure the importance of Guy Debord and his band of angels. The comparisons themselves are eloquent ...”

“... Studies at Birmingham University as a model for the future, though prospective applicants who read Michael Green’s vulnerable and tedious account of the Centre’s procedures are likely to think again. One contributor – the hapless Easthope – prefers oral poetry to ‘official written poetry, high cultural poetry’, another wants critical discussions of ...”

“... Dorset, villages swallowed by the armed services, with Rex Warner and his friend, Cecil Day-Lewis, choosing between two worlds, constructing ‘magnetic mountains’ under the influence of T. E. Lawence, brooding at Bovington. I did not notice the spiritual and religious concerns of The Aerodrome, hinted at by the epigraph, a verse of George Herbert’s ...”

“... The​ 1996 film Michael Collins shows a badly wounded James Connolly being carried on a stretcher to a chair in Kilmainham Gaol, to which he is tied before being shot by a British firing squad. Connolly was one of the fifteen rebel leaders executed in May 1916 for their part in the Easter Rising, when at least 1200 rebels battled the British forces in Dublin for six days with the aim of establishing an Irish republic ...”

“... Council Reprint Library. This already includes fiction and non-fiction by Norman Douglas, Wyndham Lewis, William Gerhardie, F.W.H. Myers and J.B. Yeats, and is designed to rescue maverick work such as this remarkable exercise in ...”

“... in custody. In all these cases there had been prior warnings of lax security. The Home Secretary, Michael Howard, commented obliquely and absurdly that current searching practice ‘exceeds required levels’. On 8 January three more prisoners escaped from Littlehey near Huntingdon. One was a rapist (a Category A offender) with Category C status, a fact which ...”

“... Reading through the counterpointing essays of Randolph Trumbach, G.S. Rousseau, Arend Huussen and Michael Rey is like eavesdropping on a seminar. Participants in the debate argue about who did what to whom, how often and for how much in a way that reinforces rather than removes the sense of confusion about categories. Exchanging rival sets of ...”

“... painted for the annual labour union parade. In one of his many solitary spells, Jim comes across Lewis Carroll’s Through the Looking-Glass. Its world seems enviably normal compared to his. We are invited to accept Empire of the Sun as both cathartic and self-revealing. Coming where it does in Ballard’s career, it proffers itself as the key to earlier ...”

“... sizing up the hills like a battlefield, unable to stop himself working out where to place the Lewis-guns for an assault on some lonely farm. But in the poem, ‘fear and shock’, or sudden death from the sky, mean freedom. Emotionally, ‘Rocky Acres’ anticipates the attitude familiar from ‘The White Goddess’, who is also to be found on top of a ...”

“... insistently before our eyes and on our skin. Behind the poem, unobtrusive as it is, lie Janet Lewis’s sixty years of devotion to artistic economy, in prose narrative rather more than in verse. But on the other hand all the more compelling testimonies seem to agree that such deliberate severity is indeed the characteristic mode in which the ...”

“... it’s true that Keith Douglas was always conscious of Isaac Rosenberg behind his shoulder, Alun Lewis of Edward Thomas. But the idea of modern warfare as one thing and of poetic response to it as another seems, in retrospect, almost Churchillian in its fixedness. Back then, although we loved the old rogue for the rodomontade and sheer cheek of his ...”

“... On the other hand, the most profoundly conservative British historian in this century, Sir Lewis Namier, cordially detested Burke and found his ideological claims a distorting distraction and delusion in the important business of political classification and observation of manoeuvre. The point is of consequence because in comparison with the ...”

“... heart was in it. In his entertaining colonial service autobiography A Mole in the Crown, Michael Carritt describes working under Anderson when he became Governor of Bengal in the mid-1930s. He had been sent to Bengal as a strongman, a trouble-shooter, to cope with a quick succession of terrorist assassinations and an increase in Indian nationalist ...”

“... of Shakespeare prompts a reference to Plato, followed by John Stuart Mill, with George Orwell and Lewis Carroll bringing up the rear. Then come ten sections on the naming of birds, the ninth dealing with those named after people. He mentions my favourite of these, the ground-dwelling forest cisticola with a rufous face, throat and breast called Mrs Moreau’s ...”

“... Keneally anatomises historical Australia by plucking from its origins a strange factual nugget. Michael Ondaatje does something similar for Canada with a wispy succession of word paintings eerily evocative of a past he cannot have known but can magically conjure. His prose is consciously poetic and at first sight seems more conditioned by the need to ...”