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“... painting and its feverish gestures; mainstream critics, who had finally come around to Jackson Pollock and company, were not happy about this turn of events. In 1949 Life had showcased Pollock under the banner: ‘Is He the Greatest Living Painter in the United States?’ In 1964 the same magazine profiled Lichtenstein under the heading: ‘Is He ...”

“... Krasner hearing a book go hurtling across the studio next to hers, smashing against a wall, and Jackson Pollock emerging with the words: ‘Goddamn it! That guy has done everything. There’s nothing left.’ But the further point of the anecdote is that Pollock did find ways, eventually, to turn the ‘everything’ to his advantage. That was partly ...”

“... 1962. The other was The New Poetry, also published in 1962. Edited by A. Alvarez, it had a crazy Jackson Pollock painting on the cover. In the Allott anthology I was intrigued by some of the poems that came towards the end, most notably Jon Silkin’s ‘Death of a Son’, whose last line (‘And out of his eyes two great tears rolled, like stones, and he ...”

“... that already in early 19th-century Yorkshire, children were being baptised with diminutives: Fred, Ben, Willie, Joe, Tom. Everywhere, some names could be given to both girls and boys – Hilary, Evelyn, Lesley, Happy, Providence – and the practice of using surnames as forenames was well established. Particular groups have periodically used this customary ...”

“... out the lies and bunglings of the Bush shower. After his speech the crowd was on its feet. Jesse Jackson appeared like a pantomime ghost from behind Kucinich and the progressives stood on their chairs. ‘What do George Bush and John Kerry have in common?’ Jackson asked. ‘Answer: they both want to be elected president ...”

“... won’t do here, either. We had Bob Hope there, of course. We were lucky, we didn’t have Jesse Jackson like we’re gonna have here.’ I asked how the funding worked. ‘Well, Washington has this idea that democracy is something you can sorta buy. They say: will it be free and fair? If we say no, not really, they say: well how much more do we have to ...”

“... troops in 2012. So severe was this spate of scandal that on 8 November the defence secretary, Ben Wallace, summoned the army board to an extraordinary meeting to address ‘core and cultural issues’. Carleton-Smith responded by announcing that an independent audit would be carried out ‘to reinforce the best and weed out the worst’.The next step came ...”

“... at the time of the first Arab-Israeli war in 1948, when ‘700,000 Jews’, in the words of David Ben-Gurion, were ‘pitted against 27 million Arabs – one against forty’ and the US joined a UN arms embargo on the region despite the fact that the Arab armies had a clear advantage in terms of weaponry. Even the CIA and the US Secretary of State George ...”

“... altogether and forcibly reconstitute peasant society into a different sort of nation, what Ben Kiernan calls ‘the indentured agrarian state’. Everyone has heard of the horrors accompanying this attempt, yet the episode itself remains ill-understood. In its own day the Cambodian revolution was interpreted by the outside world primarily in terms of ...”

“... sort of writing Smith tries out here, the seemingly non-fictional sort seen in the novels of Ben Lerner and Sheila Heti, and in Smith’s own essays. As the title On Beauty had been already used by Elaine Scarry, so Swing Time has been borrowed from the title of the 1936 Fred Astaire-Ginger Rogers vehicle, a black and white musical of waltzes and tap ...”

“... success led to reprisals by the powerful sectors in LA he had upset by his exposures. According to Ben Ehrenreich, he was ‘driven from the city by a campaign of Red-baiting disguised as fact-checking’. His portrayal of a region wrecked by systematic racism, profiteering and environmental irrationality, now controlled by an urban planning of surveillance ...”

“... continuously’ and drinking a lot; he got in fights, too, including one abortive dust-up with Jackson Pollock. Partly to escape urban temptation, Creeley, his wife, Ann, and their two young sons relocated in 1948 to a farm in New Hampshire, where he bred pigeons and poultry and tried to write. ‘I learned more about poetry as an actual activity from ...”

“... and inn, the Swan and Hoop, near Bedlam Hospital in Moorfields. In his 1963 biography Walter Jackson Bate represents the household as affectionate, and Keats in particular as brave, just and kind. In his 2012 biography, Nicholas Roe represents the young Keats as emotionally disturbed, prone to frighteningly violent outbursts (as when, at five years of ...”

“... from the dead, he married Nancy Nicholson (daughter of William Nicholson the painter, sister to Ben Nicholson and herself a skilful illustrator and designer), with whom he had three children by 1922, although it was never quite clear how keen the strongly feminist Nancy was on being married to him. Meanwhile he was supposed to be studying English literature ...”

“... Centre. Their movie tastes were not aligned. ‘What do you see in all this Hollywood dreck, Ben?’ Roth wanted to know, ‘And why are you gay men so beguiled by Bette Davis?’ Yeah, Ben, what gives? Roth: ‘You don’t look twice at Ava Gardner, who was, to put it mildly, more attractive. She had an enduring ...”