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“... Also thinking how English these occasions tended to be was the young priest in charge, Father Geoffrey Jolliffe. Father Jolliffe was Anglican but with Romish inclinations that were not so much doctrinal as ceremonial and certainly sartorial. Amiable, gregarious and plump, he looked well in the cloak he generally went about in, a priest with a bit of a ...”

“... of the way on the buy-outs they were encouraging in the Eighties. The twelve hundred directors of Wall Street firms earned about $1.1 million each in 1991, and that was after the takeover fever had faded. Somewhat further down things have not been so good at all. Relatively, the change has been extraordinary. Between 1980 and 1991, the earnings of those chief ...”

“... don’t wish to have drawn to people’s attention – for example, ‘a red flag rolled against a wall’ and ‘a gilded table quarantined from some themed exhibition space’. Merridale writes with well-crafted irony but also somewhat superciliously about Russia’s rulers, showing most of them to have been vain, greedy and power-loving, which they usually ...”

“... a consciously smooth and reader-friendly go at the anachronistic childhood memoir invented by Geoffrey Hill in the pricklier Mercian Hymns. ‘Scripture’ manifests the ‘renewed interest in narrative’ of which the 1982 Introduction spoke; and its subject-matter – school friendships, traumas and epiphanies, seen with ingenious irony as episodes from ...”

“... newsworthy events. A rogue Japanese trader had out-Leesoned Leeson by losing a billion dollars on Wall Street without his employers noticing; Clinton had successfully, as it seemed, bombed the Serbs and blackmailed the Israelis to the peace table; Humphrey the missing Downing Street cat had been found. What the Times chose to lead with on Wednesday morning ...”

“... Edison threw a switch in J.P. Morgan’s office in lower Manhattan in 1882, however, and lit up Wall Street with electricity, it seemed that demand would fall. The internal combustion engine revived it. By 1910, sales of gasoline were exceeding those of kerosene, and in 1913, the invention of thermal cracking enabled refiners to extract motor fuel even from ...”

“... through these various voices. The result is similar in spirit to Basil Bunting’s Briggflatts or Geoffrey Hill’s Mercian Hymns, a scrupulous tilling and scouring of the poet’s homeland. Despite her marked territoriality, there is an aura of communion in Oswald’s work (communion with God, nature, language – anything to hand) which can at times seem ...”

“... that I can hear every rumble and gurgle of my stomach as well as the children next door.18 March. Geoffrey Palmer’s memorial service from St Paul’s Covent Garden, one of a growing number, I imagine, of those held on Zoom. I am unexpectedly on the verge of tears for someone who always put a smile on my face in art and life. I once told him that I was ...”

“... One was picturesque and picaresque, Africa Dances: A Book about West African Negroes, published by Geoffrey Gorer in 1935 when he was 30, after a rather Waugh-like tour of French and British territories: he had been guided by Féral Benga, a ballet dancer from Senegal whom he had met in Paris. The striking pictures included a smoky painting of handsome Benga ...”

“... housemaid, who later hanged herself. A sleepy thing, the ghost manifests himself as a faint wall-stain, a draught fluttering the curtain, a twinge of fibrositis or a persistent cough. Without sympathy, or much interest, he observes the occupation of his territory by a writer and his other woman in 1965. The writer’s career is lucrative over the ...”

“... on nuclear weapons.) Lawson could, if allowed, prevent the more successful firms going to the wall. And he could assist the recovery – which now depends on corporations from abroad like Nissan taking advantage of some of Europe’s cheapest labour – of the devastated North. Meanwhile, the six million council tenants are now mostly those who are too ...”

“... the ‘fishbowl’ of the court – with its dramatic but probably unnecessary bulletproof-glass wall separating us from the public and journalists – were better able to judge the atmosphere in the court. How much difference would it have made had Clark given evidence in the way everyone else did? Armatta also gives an inaccurate account of the attempt to ...”

“... which suffers under the additional charge of turning everything into text (‘pantextualism’, ‘wall-to-wall textuality’), will obviously have an even harder time in being read by a wide audience. Certain pronouncements like Derrida’s ‘There is no hors texte’ have become notorious: they are taken out of context as ...”

“... of regular existence. A wonderful scene shows a man pushing a wheelbarrow along a path beside the wall of the camp. He is on his way to the Höss house to deliver a pile of clothes taken from the prisoners – a perk for Hedwig and her friends. They make their choices, and Hedwig is happy with a far too large fur coat. Later in the film, an angry Hedwig ...”

“... Both contemptuously reject the view, which seemed supreme after the collapse of the Berlin Wall and what used to be known (quite wrongly) as Communism, that the world is now set fair on a course to libertarian capitalist prosperity. Instead of the torch of freedom, Klein writes, ‘it seems that it may be the torch of authoritarianism that is being ...”