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“... The Great Wall is the symbol of our nation,’ says one of the speakers in this extraordinary book. ‘It’s falling to pieces, ruined by people and by the elements like a dragon hacked apart.’ China is accessible now, in one sense: you can go on a tour. No doubt the Chinese will develop new layers of opacity, and a souvenir culture to keep the West happy; there would be plenty of precedents ...”

“... means of expression’. Now English poetry, dormant since Chaucer and Lydgate, got to its feet and sang. John Leland, a friend of Wyatt’s youth, later wrote: ‘The English tongue was rude, its verses vile/Now, skilful Wyatt, it has known your file.’ The only blot on Wyatt’s record was his marriage to the daughter of a Kentish baron, Elizabeth Brooke. We ...”

“... tip. She looked at the light for a moment, and her voice cracked with the poor me’s as she sang along with the cassette. Her right arm extended gracefully, and she held the glowing cigarette against the curtains. Shuggie watched as the ash started to smoulder and then gave off a grey smoke. He started to squirm as the smoke burst with a gasp into ...”

“... pounds there and then to be able to sing that aria as my father had sung it.’ In Dublin he sang at concerts and attended recitals where he heard the great singers of the age. He also found a new job as secretary of the United Liberal Club, which welcomed both Liberals and Home Rulers at a time when Isaac Butt’s leadership of the Irish Parliamentary ...”

“... of the work gang – at the ‘county farm’, the penitentiary. Asked what he meant when he sang, ‘He’ll sure write his name up and down your back,’ House replied: ‘That means beat you up.’) Seth plays the song to Carter; they both find it ‘mesmerising’. They stay up until six in the morning, ‘cleaning up the recording and deciphering ...”

“... had roamed the country as a gaberlunzie man as if it was just a moment before yesterday. What she sang seemed to her to be fact, or at any rate truth, and her historical sense collapsed chronology. I was moved to remember this by J.F.C. Harrison’s ‘coda’ to his fine new book: ‘As writers like Thomas Hardy have noted, there is a certain timelessness ...”

“... lamp that was hanging above it; but no sooner was the lamp lit than it almost fell from my hands. Ye gods! I nearly dropped dead on the spot, that woman was so ugly.Machiavelli itemised her ugliness: her nose ‘slit open and full of snot’; her mouth ‘twisted to one side’, pooling with drool because she had no teeth; her ‘long, pointed chin that ...”

“... experienced the mercury shooting up the (phallic) thermometer and then sinking down. ‘Comatas sang this as dusk came,’ the last line reads. Comatas, and Mathews, have survived their ordeal; the poem, a stand-in for the cedar box, is a temple of Asclepius, where maladies are worked out through dreams.‘Comatas’ owes something to Theocritus’ Idyll ...”

“... might be kept humble!’ Baxter put difficult things even into his hymns – like the famous ‘Ye Holy Angels Bright’ – and that is why they have been regularly ‘modernised’ over the last three centuries. This is relevant to Sisson’s other essays, about poetry and about the modern translations of the Bible and the Prayer Book which he so ...”

“... its popularity with socially ‘mixed audiences’. When the celebrated contralto Helen D’Alton sang it at the Royal Albert Hall in 1874, the reviewer for the Musical Standard described it as ‘an over-rated effusion of maudlin sentiment, which once moved to tears a certain section of society … but is now felt to be a bore, because artificial and ...”

“... and its people. ‘John Synge, I and Augusta Gregory, thought/All that we did, all that we said or sang/Must come from contact with the soil.’ Much of Yeats’s work on Irish folklore was, as Foster points out, a collaboration with Lady Gregory.Lady Gregory also wrote plays, which had to do in various ways with ‘the soil’. The Coole Park she came to ...”

“... 16 and Lansyl Selant Applicators plc at Unit 20 (Units 17-19 currently under offer). ‘O Dio,’ sang Dame Kiri. ‘O Dio.’ And the perimeter road heard it and the sheathed and stunted saplings planted there and the dirty dribble of a stream that straggled through a concrete culvert to the lumpy field beyond, where a shabby horse contemplated two barrels ...”