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“... This biography opens with a vivid chapter on Raymond Williams’s funeral. Entitled ‘Prologue, in Memoriam’, it transports the reader to Clodock Church, ‘a plain little building’ in the foothills of the Black Mountains. It is a comfortless day, Fred Inglis tells us. ‘The light fell crooked and the road fell wrong ...”

“... was Wright’s most confessional account of the inner drama of decolonisation. He dedicated it to Eric Williams, the prime minister of Trinidad and author of Capitalism and Slavery, and to the ‘Westernised and tragic elite of Africa, Asia and the West Indians, the lonely outsiders who exist precariously on the cliff-like margins of many ...”

“... topical interest. The contents of, and reactions to, the Marx Memorial Lecture given by Professor Eric Hobsbawm in 1978 testify to a mood of doubt amounting to despair which would have astonished and dismayed a similar audience a generation ago. The Forward March of Labour has stumbled to a halt, and not in order to regroup for a final triumphant assault on ...”

“... be hard to come by a more fulsome statement of ethnonationalism. But then the academic Charlotte Williams tells King that, growing up, ‘Welshness couldn’t be assumed for a person of colour like myself, despite having been brought up in Wales, having received my entire education in Wales, having a Welsh-speaking mother.’ So is Kinnock right?...”

“... plucking at my weedish bouquetwe love niggas we love niggas notWhat the poet Phillip B. Williams has recently called the ‘seductive tokenism’ of the US poetry scene is here likened to the game effeuiller la marguerite (‘She loves me, she loves me not’). In Smith’s account, it is arbitrary which Black writers are published and which are ...”

“... the site of the city’s busiest slave market, past the Jefferson Davis Apartments, past the Hank Williams museum, which houses his 1963 blue Cadillac convertible and 17 of his suits, not far from the Rosa Parks Museum with her distinctive glasses on display – is the six-acre site of the National Memorial for Peace and Justice. It is a memorial to the ...”

“... your twenties, facing Sampras or Philippoussis or Ivanisevic, or even Navratilova, Hingis or Venus Williams: can’t be done, no way at all even of being on the same court, much less hitting their balls back. Two decades ago, wooden rackets were replaced by high-tech instruments engineered to the utmost in hitting efficiency, and daily restrung, for ever more ...”

“... murdered by a neighbourhood watchman called George Zimmerman; in 2014 the killings of Brown and Eric Garner, an unarmed man from Staten Island who was choked to death by a white police officer, revitalised the Black Lives Matter movement. It was also during this period that the liberal papers that have championed Coates’s work began to drop the term ...”

“... consciously controlled professional technique. It was a struggle away from everything Vaughan Williams seemed to stand for.’ Vaughan Williams taught composition at the RCM, but Britten bypassed him anyway. Since the age of 14 he had been having lessons with Frank Bridge; his mother would take him to London in the ...”

“... poet: he is also an internationally respected immunologist. Like the American poet William Carlos Williams, whose work he greatly admires, Holub has always insisted that scientific and poetic enquiry constantly overlap. Holub, though, is far readier than Williams ever was to incorporate scientific terminology into the ...”

“... has led Roy Jenkins and David Marquand to abandon the party. A desperate public cry to Shirley Williams: why have you got so lost in that company, one with ineffable self-confidence but without either a social base or alternative policies – you who once knew the Labour Party as inherently a coalition? I think of my late and lamented friend, John ...”

“... vulgarity, the lack of good taste, which made Epstein a success and a scandal. The blandness of Eric Gill’s sculpture, which Gardiner contrasts with Epstein’s vigour, is an example of the kind of English tastefulness to which Epstein offered an alternative. The Epstein-England match had its tragi-comic moments, culminating in Louis Tussaud’s waxworks ...”

“... ominous Hitlerian smell about it.’ Maud particularly loathed South Africa’s foreign minister, Eric Louw: ‘an unprepossessing and neurotic figure, so disturbingly reminiscent of Dr Goebbels’. He advised Macmillan that Verwoerdism was bound to fail ‘for the simple reason that it is not only evil but cannot be made to fit the facts: it is a policy for ...”

“... almost continuously in Birmingham. The city was his imaginative centre: what Paterson had been to Williams and Gloucester, Mass. to Olson. Those American precedents would come to matter over the years, but in Fisher’s early work the co-ordinates were set by Eliot, Rilke and Urban Renewal. The waste land in City is Birmingham, gutted by postwar development ...”

“... abbreviated as the Dictionary’s. Was it fear, diffidence or shame, for instance, that made Eric Blair rechristen himself at the start of his career? As Christopher Hollis tells us: ‘The reasons he gave for changing his name are oddly unconvincing. He complained that Blair was a Scots name and that he disliked Scotland because of its association with ...”