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“... ending for Dickens’s The Mystery of Edwin Drood. The latterday MacLean industry is touched on by Jack Webster in his biography of the novelist, who died in 1987. It seems the invitation to MacNeill to tackle the master’s outlines came from Collins on the strength of a manuscript of his own he had submitted to the firm. It was ‘a heaven-sent ...”

“... dying husband and who then, traumatically, fail to be in touch for weeks on end. Both Nora in Nora Webster (2014) and Lily Devereux in The Blackwater Lightship (1999) fall into that category, as does the mother in the story ‘One Minus One’. Eilis’s mother, though widowed early, hasn’t been unmotherly in that way. But in old age she has turned ...”

“... Home, Boughton is old too, and widowed, when his daughter, Glory, and eventually his wayward son, Jack, come home. Just as Robinson is prepared to take great risks in placing religious belief at the very centre of a character’s being – not as something which will animate the plot, but as something as ordinary and fundamental to a novel as money or love ...”

“... seen her in almost a year – they often lived apart, and she’d been seeing a man called Jack – they immediately fall into talking as they always did, with their own familiar banter. ‘Did you know that flange means “undesirable vagina”?’ Lily asks. ‘I’ve missed you,’ Finn says. Finn decides they should go on a road trip, and ...”

“... richer sound banks achieved by the saxophone section, expanded to five with the addition of Ben Webster’s tenor in late 1939. By turns volcanic and lyrical (‘Rosebud,’ he seems about to whisper at the end of ballads), Webster became the band’s most compelling solo voice, a great instrumental crooner and jungle ...”

“... first part, in which Lowell talks about Robert Bridges, Trumbull Stickney, Propertius, Baudelaire, Webster, Shakespeare and a poem of his own, is even slightly crazier than the second: in fact the whole thing is, as it ought to be, a model of sober discussion, recognising the eminence of the recipient and the young man’s respect for him. In the end these ...”

“... Park, led by giant papier-mâché models of Adolf Hitler and the National Front’s Martin Webster. The route passed Brick Lane, scene of recurring clashes between the Front and the local Bengali population. Red Saunders was the compère. He had grown enormous sideburns, and wore a hat covered in badges and a ‘Mr Oligarchy’ cape. The punk ...”

“... he gave back too, teaching men as gifted as Marlowe psychological subtlety, and as individual as Webster how to use poetry in drama and how to respect the heroism of women. A whole marvellous theatre might not have come fully into being, and have influenced centuries of English (and American) poetry, without the ‘Jack of ...”

“... Dorsey again (‘I may be the only singer who ever took vocal lessons from a trombone’), and Ben Webster (one of the first acts showcased on Sinatra’s own Reprise label). But a third influence is more notable, and an indication of just how deeply jazz was lodged in the young singer’s soul: the tenor saxophonist Lester Young. Young was Billie Holiday’s ...”

“... who influenced me was not Baudelaire but Jules Laforgue, so the dramatic poets were Marlowe and Webster and Tourneur and Middleton and Ford, not Shakespeare. A poet of the supreme greatness of Shakespeare can hardly influence, he can only be imitated: and the difference between influence and imitation is that influence can fecundate, whereas imitation ...”