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“... The thought of writing a poem about tramlines beginning: The city lies bound in its net of tramlines ... got no further. Go out and look at the tramlines, they don’t bind the city at all, they lie in the street between comradely ranks of cobblestones, go out and look at the city, it’s not bound, cities can’t be bound. No, tramlines are for putting small change on, the tram paraded uphill over the brown coins, with us in the gateway ready to scatter if the tram stopped, the conductor got out! Coins squashed flat and now bigger than English pennies, often flattened and twisted, no elk on them then but the good old king ...”

“... for Sebastian Barry Possible seals disappearing far-out off Pembrokeshire, sleek commas suddenly lost in the sea’s murky prose, came back to me (memories taking a year to surface) as we returned at midnight from the Laird and Dog. It was our daily goal, two poets retreating from a Writers’ Retreat to beer’s bitter salve. We’d walk out at twilight, up a drive squeezed through firs, shuttled over by crows readying for the night (or once, flung from their nests, fissile, by a donkey’s blaring Bronx roars through Midlothian in fractured Trombonese) and return, talking poetry in the half-seas-over dark, down the drive’s black on black curving into deeper dark ...”

“... in Holden’s precise and constricted world. In The Player Queen’s Wife, his second collection, Oliver Reynolds does Hopkins and his ‘curtal sonnet’ one better. Hopkins trimmed the sonnet to ten and a half lines; Reynolds pares it to five. Here is ‘Map’, from ‘Seven Little Sonnets for Frederick the ...”

“... than in the eerie detachment of the language and the strange familiarity of Brac’s landscapes. Oliver Reynolds is another Faber poet with Martian smatterings; his long opening poem, ‘Victoriana’, ends lamely in a blind alley with the image of glue globules on the pages of a book: ‘braille tracks healing the torn paper’. But the poem has a good ...”

“... off to Longchamp for the weekend. A thief goes home to the wife in Up-minster. So why did Bruce Reynolds, a main player in this country’s robbery of the century, choose to call his book The Autobiography of a Thief ? It was, he says, a bit of homage to Jean Genet. The Thief’s Journal was being translated into English just as Bruce and Buster and Charlie ...”

“... not begin with ‘Sunday Morning’, but Jonathan Barker suggests that Ron Butlin, James Lasdun, Oliver Reynolds and other talents have been influenced, like Vendler’s Americans, by the world of Canon Aspirin. This seems doubtful. To read the PBS volume after the Faber Book is to be almost crushed by the pressure of social detail. It is to enter a ...”

“... but on the wrong house. At No. 9, a more accurately sited plaque marks where, in 1764, Joshua Reynolds and Samuel Johnson founded the Literary Club, or simply the Club, which met weekly to dine in an upstairs room at the Turk’s Head until the landlord died and the dinners moved elsewhere. The building now houses New Loon Moon, one of London’s ...”

“... the filtered smoke is invisible.Another way to remember the dead is through a death mask. Nick Reynolds, an artist and musician in London, begins by doing the hair, then covers the face in moisturiser before applying blue dental alginate and plaster bandages for rigidity. After twenty minutes, he shakes out the head and lines the mould with polyurethane ...”

“... Is​ there an 18th-century writer to rival Oliver Goldsmith? Who else achieved lasting popular and critical success in all three major genres? The Vicar of Wakefield has never been out of print; The Deserted Village was a schoolroom favourite well into the 20th century; and She Stoops to Conquer is still performed ...”

“... The engraving​ called A Literary Party at Sir Joshua Reynolds’s shows nine men seated around a table convivially cluttered with decanters and after-dinner debris. From left to right they are James Boswell, Samuel Johnson, Joshua Reynolds, David Garrick, Edmund Burke, Pasquale Paoli, Charles Burney, Thomas Warton and Oliver Goldsmith ...”

“... that must be taken seriously. ‘A second-class intellect but a first-class temperament.’ Oliver Wendell Holmes’s famous line, which dates from 1933, was, as Black reminds us, quite possibly a reference to Theodore Roosevelt rather than Franklin. But FDR was certainly no systematic thinker. Asked to define his philosophy, he said: ‘I’m a ...”

“... 1948 Allan Wingate published British Pamphleteers, a collection of tracts assembled by Richard Reynolds and introduced by George Orwell. The first pamphlet in the book is John Knox’s First Blast of the Trumpet (1558), which begins: ‘To promote a woman to beare rule, superioritie, dominion or empire above any realme, nation, or citie, is repugnant to ...”

“... should be, different from each other,’ Egerton says. ‘Wright is not elevated by putting down Reynolds, nor are his gifts easily measured against Gainsborough’s. Wright is his own man.’ The point is taken, but Wright’s differences, the strangeness which creeps into some of his portrait groups, his predilection for lamplight and fireworks, eruptions ...”

“... Artists could grow quickly famous – and wealthy – via prints of their paintings; Joshua Reynolds’s sold in their thousands. In 1789, the publisher John Boydell opened his ‘Shakespeare Gallery’ in Pall Mall, where, for an entrance fee of one shilling, visitors could enjoy paintings of scenes from Shakespeare’s plays, commissioned by Boydell ...”

“... imagine, as you pass through the London of 1740-70, that this was also a place where Johnson and Oliver Goldsmith, Edmund Burke and Joshua Reynolds, Edmund Malone, William Pitt and David Garrick could meet in the upstairs room of a pub to exchange genial perceptions on the course of the moral universe. I am pleased for ...”