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“... his soft white hair and snowy silken ruff of beard, would have been delighted by the compliment. Philip Callow’s book is the most imaginative re-creation yet made of the poet’s daily physical being, and the photographs of the poet at all ages, from early manhood and the strange Piero Christlikeness of middle age to the bearded and Lear-like sage of ...”

“... a couple of memorably macabre dramas – Rope and Gaslight – which Hamilton himself scorned as callow sensationalism. Rope, a savage homo-erotic farce by Orton out of Wilde, made his name and fortune, and was filmed without cuts by Hitchcock in a celebrated cinematic experiment. Gaslight, first performed in 1939, is a spooky tale of patriarchal paranoia ...”

“... Press think they are doing. What readers can they think they are catering for, if not such callow and eagerly attentive 18-year-olds as I was fifty years ago? Of course I find this heartening as well as surprising. If the book sells, I shall he on the sidelines cheering. Rather mutedly, though. For through the at most three centuries when printed ...”

“... go through that again.’ In his Passchendaele, which marks the 70th anniversary of that occasion, Philip Warner argues that the worst feature of the battle was that it so ‘disheartened the democracies’ that they ‘became less willing to preserve peace by preparing for war’. Yet in the military context of the day the attempt to enlarge the Ypres Salient ...”

“... went so far as to describe Montgomery’s Alamein as ‘an unnecessary battle’. Now Philip Warner has attempted a reassessment of Auchinleck’s career in the light of newly-available sources, including revelations of the significant part played by Ultra intelligence in the later stages of the North African campaigns. Colonel John Auchinleck ...”

“... to task for the crime of being young – that one badly wanted to warm to its refreshingly callow, hectoring and capacious take on the history of fiction. Sadly, Miss Herbert was not what it seemed, and over the long (600-page) haul Thirlwell’s mild nostrums about the primacy of world over word, story over sentence, often undermined his formal ...”

“... Desperate Characters is ‘obviously superior to any novel by Fox’s contemporaries John Updike, Philip Roth and Saul Bellow’. My own reservations lie not with the superlatives, but with the implicit grounds for comparison. If Fox is, in Franzen’s phrase, ‘inarguably great’ – and I believe she is – it isn’t because, for example, she does a ...”

“... Floyd Chaceley, Neal Brose, Pete Redmarley, Ross Wilcox, Gary Drake, ‘Squelch’, Grant Burch, Philip Phelps, Lee Biggs, the Tookey brothers, Ant Little, Darren Croome. There are too many to take in, but almost all of them feature more or less prominently later in the novel, and one of the difficulties of being a teenager, too often oversimplified in ...”

“... he had been ‘bold in my youth’ (audax iuuenta, oddly miscued by Peter Fallon as ‘still a callow youth’). Again, it is amazing that the poet who embarked on the Aeneid had seven or eight years earlier published a poem in which his desire to write an epic was suavely depreciated by Apollo, the god of poetry. At the beginning of the sixth ...”

“... of analogies which, as in the Martian school of poetry, are some times coruscating and sometimes callow. In this, Modern Times, Modern Places is more Post-Modern than Modern. Modernist art may be allergic to absolute meanings, but it cannot rid itself of a dream of depth, plagued as it is by a nostalgia for the days when truth, reality and redemption were ...”

“... wife in The Winter’s Tale’ or wonder whether Shakespeare was remembering ‘his own callow wooing’ of her in Love’s Labour’s Lost, because she marshals a much more convincing body of evidence: local archives that provide a rich social context for the lives of men and women like Ann Hathaway and William Shakespeare, who grew ...”

“... The dissident Left – as opposed to the proto-Communist Left – symbolised by Dwight Macdonald, Philip Rahv and others. The Cold War hardliners, such as Melvyn Lasky, Irving Kristol, James Burnham, Sidney Hook and later Norman Podhoretz. The ‘End of Ideology’ liberal professoriat: Daniel Bell, Nathan Glazer, Lewis Coser. And perhaps most enduring in ...”

“... began fourteen long years in literary limbo. Her rediscovery came in 1977. Two influential fans, Philip Larkin and Lord David Cecil, named her as their ‘most underrated author’ in the TLS and she was taken up in a flurry of publicity, interviewed on radio and TV. Quartet in Autumn, the novel she had on the stocks, was subsequently shortlisted for the ...”

“... loved as you are, Have you any rights at all? Well, that is enough of that. I will move from the callow glory of ‘Khamsin: A Sequence’, and the earlier poem about trees, to a general point. When I look at these two samples now, I discover that when I used a tight metrical or rhyme scheme, I could usually save myself from my own worst idiocies. Because I ...”

“... This unanimity should therefore be worth looking into, especially in the case of work like Philip Larkin’s, always more reserved and elusive than it seems. I want to consider his writing in juxtaposition with that of Kingsley Amis, close friend of the poet’s for over forty years; and to begin with Amis’s recent Booker Prize-winning novel. The ...”