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Writing the Night

Hugh Haughton, 25 January 1996

Selected Poems 
by David Gascoyne.
Enitharmon, 253 pp., £8.95, November 1994, 1 870612 34 5
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... early in the Second World War: Morning. Full chorus of the birds. A Sun Of nascent ardour in the sapphire dome. Now Memnon’s massive kings with mouths of stone Chant their aubade. Now down the valleys come Innocent minstrels in whose unstained eyes Vision unfolds vibrating like a flower ... Yggdrasil, Jordan and Orpheus follow Memnon’s massive kings ...

Roaring Boy

Adam Phillips: Hart Crane, 30 September 1999

The Broken Tower: A Life of Hart Crane 
by Paul Mariani.
Norton, 492 pp., $35, April 1999, 0 393 04726 1
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O My Land, My Friends: The Selected Letters of Hart Crane 
edited by Langdon Hammer and Brom Weber.
Four Walls Eight Windows, 562 pp., $35, July 1997, 0 941423 18 2
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... pride.’ His poetry, which he seemed quite literally to live for, would restore him – ‘In sapphire arenas of the hills/I was promised an improved infancy’ – and renew America: The Bridge was to be his ‘mystical synthesis of America’. But his pride had been plunged in his family’s shame, and his country, sliding, as he saw it, towards a ...

The School of English

Hilary Mantel: ‘The School of English’: A Story, 7 May 2015

... the moment of ease: that did not disappoint. She left the pod on the worktop, glowing like a sapphire on the granite. She had made a list of all outstanding matters to be achieved before ski break was over, and it ran to two pages, but for the next six days her time was her own to arrange. For an hour or so after the family’s departure, their voices ...

Diary

David Craig: Barra Microcosm, 24 May 2001

... Scotland tectonic ages ago and churned southward. Now and again we couch down in the bents, among sapphire glints of milkwort and buttery stars of primroses, and I record my impressions of this long flowery reef in the ocean, the foothold it has been for people, and their own stories. ‘My father,’ Donald MacLellan said 117 years ago, went away with boats ...

Inky Pilgrimage

Mark Ford, 24 May 2007

The Contemplated Spouse: The Letters of Wallace Stevens to Elsie 
edited by Donald Blount.
South Carolina, 430 pp., £30.95, January 2006, 1 57003 248 3
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... moonlightRose on the beach floors.How explicit the coiffures became,The diamond point, the sapphire point,The sequinsOf the civil fans!Insinuations of desire,Puissant speech, alike in each,Cried quittanceTo the wickless halls.Then from their poverty they roseFrom dry guitars, and to catarrhsThey flittedThrough the palace walls.For Stevens such baroque ...

Peerie Breeks

Robert Crawford: Willa and Edwin Muir, 21 September 2023

Edwin and Willa Muir: A Literary Marriage 
by Margery Palmer McCulloch.
Oxford, 350 pp., £100, March, 978 0 19 285804 7
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The Usurpers 
by Willa Muir, edited by Anthony Hirst and Jim Potts.
Colenso, 290 pp., £15, March, 978 1 912788 27 9
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... as a student Willa dumped her philandering rugby-player fiancé, Cecil, and flung her diamond and sapphire engagement ring into the sea off St Andrews pier. Willa died, back in Scotland, in 1970. Margery Palmer McCulloch, who wrote this perceptive and sympathetic account in her own old age, did not live to see it ...

Going Up

Tobias Gregory: The View from Above, 18 May 2023

Celestial Aspirations: Classical Impulses in British Poetry and Art 
by Philip Hardie.
Princeton, 353 pp., £38, April 2022, 978 0 691 19786 9
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... secrets of the abyss to spy.He passed the flaming bounds of place and time:The living throne, the sapphire-blaze,Where angels tremble while they gaze,He saw; but blasted with excess of light,Closed his eyes in endless night.One​ could, broadly speaking, describe the history of Western cosmological thinking in terms of three ...

Subversions

R.W. Johnson, 4 June 1987

Traitors: The Labyrinths of Treason 
by Chapman Pincher.
Sidgwick, 346 pp., £13.95, May 1987, 0 283 99379 0
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The Secrets of the Service: British Intelligence and Communist Subversion 1939-51 
by Anthony Glees.
Cape, 447 pp., £18, May 1987, 0 224 02252 0
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Freedom of Information – Freedom of the Individual? 
by Clive Ponting, John Ranelagh, Michael Zander and Simon Lee, edited by Julia Neuberger.
Macmillan, 110 pp., £4.95, May 1987, 0 333 44771 9
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... legendary spy chief, was actually the French Philby and there was a whole network of spies (‘the Sapphire network’) within the French Government. A huge and inconclusive hunt was conducted. Then Golitsyn announced the existence of the ‘Sasha network’ in German Intelligence. Another huge and inconclusive hunt. Occasionally, Golitsyn did provide useful ...

I thought you were incredible

Bee Wilson: Elizabeth Taylor’s Magic, 16 November 2023

Elizabeth Taylor: The Grit and Glamour of an Icon 
by Kate Andersen Brower.
HarperCollins, 495 pp., £25, December 2022, 978 0 00 843582 0
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... met in London, then again at a dinner in Los Angeles, where he told her she should be wearing a sapphire to match her eyes. This time, she got married in a registry office wearing a grey suit. Within a couple of years, Taylor and Wilding had two sons. Clift lavished the babies with presents and friends joked that perhaps they were his, to which he ...

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