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“... seventies. The Swans had always lived in Littlehampton, a middling-sized Sussex town with a sandy beach and a pier whose architecture was described by Pevsner as ‘a rather bewildering mixture of Old Hastings and Bournemouth’. By the time of the libels, most of her older siblings had left home. Only two brothers, Stephen and Ernest, both of them labourers ...”

“... One of the tempests Doc writes about in Songs is the Florida criminal trial of dishevelled Palm Beach heiress and cocaine slut Roxanne Pulitzer, and his words on that abominable scene richly echo the gnarled politics that have both paralysed America as a whole and effectively crippled the one thing that Doc holds so dear – the craft of journalism. Not ...”

“... This is all too reminiscent of the standard schoolboy cynic argument: I choose to lounge on the beach; Mother Theresa chooses to care for the poor in India; we both do what makes us feel good, and both do what we want to do; so what’s the difference? Arguments like this have long been used by adolescents to ward off burdensome distinctions like that ...”

“... most strongly have enjoyed critical sponsorship: Roy Fisher and J.H. Prynne in Donald Davie’s Thomas Hardy and British Poetry, the late Veronica Forrest-Thomson through her own theoretical book Poetic Artifice. In spurning both a polemical introduction and the biographical notes, this anthology may define itself against the run of post-war ...”

“... and unambiguous sexual invitation’. Hope has been rebuked for saying this – for example, by Thomas Puttfarken in the present journal (Vol. 3, No 6). The great nudes of modern art – women transformed by Henry Moore into stones and bones, by Picasso into erotic hieroglyphics, and by Matisse into lyrical calligraphy – are not only far less naturalistic ...”

“... have started a St Patrick’s Day parade – among them Fairbanks, Albuquerque, Honolulu and Palm Beach. But how Irish does taking part in a parade make you? This is the concern of Irish America, which asks whether people who identify themselves as Irish-Americans have distinctive ways of behaving or thinking, five, six or seven generations down from the ...”

“... that Bill Gates earned more than the lowest-paid 40 per cent of Americans combined. ‘Once,’ Thomas Frank writes in his terrific book One Market under God :2 Americans imagined that economic democracy meant a reasonable standard of living for all – that freedom was only meaningful once poverty and powerlessness had been ...”

“... serve to underwrite the poet’s imaginative participation in the soldiers’ frolics on the beach. The militarised male body throws off its ‘bestial strength/And bestial decay’ and grows ‘fragile and luminous’: Stands in the soft air, tasting after toil The sweetness of his nakedness: letting the sea-waves coil Their frothy tongues about his ...”

“... the implications are still open. Dyce remained a deeply religious man. Pegwell Bay is not Dover Beach. Dyce’s other commission that year was a mural on the east end of the Ecclesiologists’ show church, All Saints, Margaret Street. The church, like the picture, was an expression of the high Victorian moment that, for a while, held faith and science in ...”

“... In​ the summer of 1963, between the appearance of Thomas Pynchon’s first book and the Beatles’ second long-player, John Williams, a professor at the University of Denver, sent his agent in New York a draft of his latest novel, which detailed the unhappy marriage, undistinguished career and early death from cancer of an imagined professor at the University of Missouri a generation earlier ...”

“... be acknowledged as an inspiration; defensively denounced, but perhaps more important, was Dylan Thomas. Thomas may have looked like an ‘ugly puffy fatso’ when he visited Cambridge during Redgrove’s student days, but he ‘kept visionary poetry alive for me and kept me alive too’. Redgrove’s finest early ...”

“... of Athens invites adaptation because it is already a collaboration – it was partly written by Thomas Middleton, who composed its city comedy-like scenes – and because the text we have is unfinished. Hytner drew in popular unrest of the sort shown in the Jack Cade scenes of Henry VI Part II and by the mob in Julius Caesar. To make Timon of Athens a play ...”

“... five early adopters of synth/beat-box tech I personally called to mind weren’t so pale: Timmy Thomas, Shuggie Otis, Sly Stone, Stevie Wonder, Lee Perry.)But Schütte isn’t finished yet. Kraftwerk’s influence, it seems, also determined every molecule of 1980s electro-pop. They ‘set the blueprint for all later bands and musicians working in the area ...”

“... of a shock is a bag lady finding a copy of Sartor Resartus in a Manhattan trash can. You think: Thomas Carlyle! On East End Avenue! Wild! Passages in All the Days and Nights suggest the earnest exposition of a local historian: ‘The business district of Draperville, Illinois (population 12,000) was built around a neo-Roman courthouse and the courthouse ...”

“... as ‘non-indigenous’) is Edge of Trees. It represents the line of vegetation at the top of the beach through which the first gaggle of British colonists looked for the natives who Sir Joseph Banks, urging the settlement, had said would not pose much of a problem. That line, across which black Australia stared back, was a threshold between visibility and ...”