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“... Both David Cressy and Cynthia Herrup believe they are writing microhistory, a word coined by Italians, but used to describe above all the work of Natalie Zemon Davis (The Return of Martin Guerre, 1983) and Robert Darnton (The Great Cat Massacre, 1984). Microhistorians have turned to the verbatim records of interrogations kept in the law courts of early modern Europe (or at least those parts of Europe where Roman law procedures were followed) to reconstruct the detailed stories of individual trials ...”

“... The Sun ran it as a front page story: ‘Scandal of £600 a week Asians’. The Mirror followed up by condemning a ‘New Flood of Asians into Britain’. The Express warned that 145,000 further migrants might follow. Supporters of the National Front rushed to Gatwick to chant: ‘Don’t unpack, you must go back.’ In local elections on 6 May (the same day ...”

“... with scribble. The sport is hugely popular; hundreds jostle for admission to the gyms, And must be coaxed out when their time is up. A few, though, Seem unable to play, and sit staring out of windows, eating their ...”

“... would do better, A tiny refined-alloy sleeve Inserted deep in the pulsing darkness. It might be still better if they invented In some far century to come An entire person of titanium. Watching the Angiogram A creature struggles under ice, Black spider twitching, bunching Its spiny legs while shoals of its young Come clustering round it, spawned From its ...”

“... your heartbeat, settles to sleep, as stones roll in the wavebreak, as daylight dies –Dies touch by touch and you are left to chance,To moonrise, to what you know of bones and the sea,Of the bloodless shapes that come to you in dream. The stone is at your bedside between the book you have set aside and the photograph of your children who can ...”

“... a hint of pleasurable speculation in her glance, too, an assessment, perhaps, of what he might yet be encouraged to amount to. And that’s it. She departs from the film as abruptly as she entered, taking with her pretty much all that’s rich and strange about it. To a greater extent than any other form of mass transit, underground railways create an ...”

“... The condition (cancer) and the person (myself) Reeled towards each other over the years, Capsules slowly converging. Now they have docked – ‘Raped!’ the Soviet spacemen used to shout As the new arrival fitted in.                                               The surgeon Is using homely words: ‘We will take away Everything except the nerves and muscles’ (That’s sound, just what I would have done myself ...”

“... Feverish After Yannis Ritsos Small squares on the move, merging, pulling apart, building bricks unbuilding, a city of windows inside a city of windows, everything hanging on two right-angles, free-standing, out of whack but somehow holding, somehow safe you decide at the very moment they crack and start to collapse (in utter silence) all of a heap where three fleabitten dogs set off at an easy lope going first through one small square then another, and etcetera, the scent of the alien dead ripe in their nostrils ...”

“... a bullfinch song for a goldfinch chime. We speak through the wind and only then in murmurs. By dusk we are whispers and secret playtime rhymes. We stretch our limbs into the wind and catch at birds. Our tree rings are school bells that peal in December bartering a bullfinch song for a goldfinch chime. By dusk we are ...”

“... leaving behind     only yourself and     the door unlocked venture down     the avenue for the messages     becoming the street as you go          and keeping an eye out for a hole in your shoe     the dog’s first worda bundle of rye     tomorrow’s papera pub with no beer     a hole in the sky they ...”

“... features of Jewish life are often stowed below as so much embarrassing luggage which ought not to be seen outside the family circle, and replaced with a roll-call of Jewish heroes in the arts and sciences. The undeniable fact that a people of whom there are no more than 15 million throughout the world should have had an influence in nearly all fields of human ...”

“... Dunne knew he was washed up. For most of his life he had been trying to get into Hollywood by acting as more than he was. Or without pausing to ask what he was. As a stage manager for NBC TV he’d been picked to work on their 1952 production of The Petrified Forest – with Humphrey Bogart repeating his classic 1936 role, Henry Fonda doing Leslie ...”

“... How this pale dawn light floods in from the skyline.How it seems almost at times to fail as if it mightfall back to midnight’s deep blue-black: as if it should.I am given over to dreams that say what’s mine is mine.I dreamt I was at this window and here I am:not dreaming, or so I think, though something stays.Dream has its flow, pain its own song to sing ...”

“... When Wyndham Lewis described the Men of 1914 as a ‘youth racket’ invented by Ezra Pound, he presumably didn’t mean to be complimentary. Pound, however, might be said to have had the last laugh, since it is now customary to regard the whole of American literature as a gigantic youth racket ...”

“... is held to have had a devastating and irreversible impact on a postwar theatre scene dominated by winsome drawing-room comedies and witless country-house whodunnits. At the time, the play and its message were anatomised in leading articles, discussed by school debating societies, and worried at in the pulpit. In ...”