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“... to be a rubbish bin for England’s trash’ (the trash, he believes, headed South: on which see Horn, below.) Methodically, group by group, Thompson analyses his emigrating East Anglians, documenting their rootedness, immobility, conservatism and lack of enterprise. Evidence to the contrary is smartly dealt with, sometimes by means of rather remarkable ...”

“... it. But practically (and this is his first-rate triumph) we don’t think much about it. Henry James is not the first writer to have been impressed yet baffled by Pierre Loti. Anatole France, who called him the ‘sublime illiterate’, believed that, of all their contemporaries, he was ‘the most sure to last’. To his peers Loti was a distinct ...”

“... it, Lord. Get Al on to it, And if it turns out to be more than you can handle Raise Jehovah on the horn. May the Lord and Allah with Jehovah’s proverbial In-depth back-up and sales apparatus Make a concerted effort to cut the crap, For the following reasons among others: Lest at least two kinds of Christians during their annual shoot-out Bisect an old lady ...”

“... by doing or seeming to do nothing. It was the fashion. Gary Cooper, Clint Eastwood, Lee Marvin, James Coburn, and in England – and in a different, English way – Michael Caine, seldom did anything else. It was also a manner which could not always be easily distinguished from simple idleness. For the first 25 years of Mitchum’s career, his performances ...”

“... present Duke of Kent? You start to see why I was glad I went. Such sights were trophies, ivory and horn Destined for carving into objets d’art. Ideas already jumping like popcorn, I climbed down but had not gone very far Between that old Dakota and the car When what they told me stretched the uncrossed space Into a universe. No tears were shed. Forgive ...”

“... of Nazism’s intellectual architects, Carl Schmitt, who, writing on Hamlet, sees in the murder of James I’s father a true north that, although absent in the text itself, orients all its compasses, making England – or, rather, Scotland – the real of Denmark, and the real of medieval Danish politics the modern Elizabethan court. This line of thinking is ...”

“... In a letter dated 22 January 1934 to his protégé James Laughlin, Pound makes passing reference to R.P. Blackmur, who had written a long unflattering essay, ‘Masks of Ezra Pound’, in an issue of the periodical Hound and Horn (which Pound renamed Bitch – Bugle). Next day he refers to it again – ‘24 depressing pages ...”

“... Brag was its making so little of the other ascribed poem in Rawlinson 160: the Epitaph on Elias James. As Leslie Hotson showed some years ago, Shakespeare had links with a brewer of that name during his sojourn near St Andrew by the Wardrobe. Doubtless the Oxford editors felt that a single unfamiliar poem was as much as the public would swallow at once, but ...”

“... likes to translate ‘Box of Eye-Paint’ but which is, I understand, more correctly rendered ‘Horn of Antimony’. If there were a Spark Notebook, like Henry James’s, an imaginable entry might run: ‘Suppose that in our time some rich man were not only deep in the study of Job but himself in a situation of ...”

“... Warhol, Francis Bacon and Jenny Saville; the performance and video artists Joseph Beuys, Rebecca Horn, Bruce Nauman, Arnulf Rainer and Matthew Barney. Their work commonly involves the display of the artists themselves in extremis: Orlan’s increasingly drastic bouts of plastic surgery; the stages of Hannah Wilke’s death from cancer; Stelarc’s ...”

“... been used. In a fit, she drives round to MacQuarrie’s house, parks outside, and leans on the car horn until something happens. The whole town knows about the jilting, of course. Buddy Shields, the night constable, tells her to forget it, and to move on. Even in her distress, Helen is amused that Buddy Shields should be telling her what to do: she used to ...”

“... Good Hope, ‘for a period of one thousand years’. Together with his younger brother, the future James II and VII, and assorted London merchants, the king was set to make a fortune from gold, ivory and enslaved Africans trafficked from the Ivory Coast. While Howe’s antipathy to the monarchy ran deep, he was never one to miss out on a party. So in June ...”

“... be ‘studied but in passage’. Ancient philosophy might be dead, but with the blessing of King James, a fertile new philosophy was about to take its place – ‘a spouse, for generation, fruit and comfort’ as Bacon put it – and its vigorous offspring were destined to conquer new worlds of ‘endless progress or proficience’. Seventeenth-century ...”

“... on spreading the good word that ‘metropolitan improvements’ – the upbeat title of a book by James Elmes which Shepherd illustrated – were steadily bringing into existence a city whose size, wealth and new look were rapidly making it the unchallenged capital of the world. Involved, because, like Dr Johnson and Charles Lamb, Scharf was a tireless London ...”

“... in the dawn Cheered when the galleys raced towards Aegina, Our patriots now lean on the car horn. The little motor-boats from the marina Are teeming in each other’s wash like spawn. All wish the Fleet fair winds for Argentina. Invincible looks worthy of its name. The battleship Repulse once looked the same. I don’t doubt our atomic submarines ...”