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“... The poem ends with a reference to the death of Edward Thomas. Lewis himself was killed in 1944.Sarah Moss’s new novel is set in a lochside cabin park in the Trossachs. The poem behind its title is William Watson’s ‘The Ballad of Semmerwater’, about a city lost beneath a lake. But Lewis’s poem seems truer to its spirit, as rain keeps ...”

“... and, apart from one rough patch, seem to have been very happy. They had two daughters, Jane and Sarah.In the midst of this, Ramsey was doing philosophy. He translated the Tractatus in the winter of 1921-22, though the credit was given to one of his mentors, C.K. Ogden. The translation appeared in 1922 and was reviewed in the journal Mind – by Frank ...”

“... Yet he irks me. Even his description of a pussy. It could as easily be a tree. (The velveteen of moss in the ingathered crotch of my limbs, the investiture of algae on the terraces of my bark, etc.) It’s true: one object in an Updike novel could just as easily be another, in that what is being described never seems to interrupt the flow of prose. The ...”

“... a comedy routine: for every teaspoon of the avant-garde in her work, there is a tablespoon of Sarah Silverman, telegraphed in titles that ‘deface’ canonical writers (‘Keats Is Dead So Fuck Me from Behind’) or ‘elevate’ pop culture ephemera (‘Monica’, named for the character from Friends). I put ‘deface’ and ‘elevate’ in scare ...”

“... in March last year, and the subsequent harassment of two students involved in this incident, Sarah Hollis and Steven Shaw. The student story ends (for the present) less happily: within the last few weeks Steven Shaw has fled the country to put himself out of the reach of further police persecution, and to avoid the compounded injury of being prosecuted ...”

“... Robey, Harry Lauder, Dan Leno and Vesta Tilley rubbed shoulders with the likes of Sir Henry Wood, Sarah Bernhardt and the Ballets Russes. Dickens was fascinated by the performing style of Charles Mathews, a blacked-up minstrel, and put it to use in his own public readings, though without the burned cork. T.S. Eliot revered Marie Lloyd, and the present ...”

“... heck I was doing. And there I am, poking around trying to get that string out. All of a sudden, Sarah pops her head out from under the bed – with this big smile – and yells: ‘Hi, Mommy!’ Nippert-Eng asks her readers to look at the amount of ‘work’ Gina has to do to ensure she has some privacy (and even that fails), and to consider also how much ...”

“... brown suits and frockish overcoats – is intended to make him look like ‘the type of man Kate Moss might date’, according to a BBC website (Jarvis Cocker is mentioned, and the narrowness of Pete Doherty’s trousers). Then there is the BBC stylist’s choice of footwear: Converse Chucks, subsequently chosen to signify nubility by David Cameron’s ...”

“... New Orleans’s Saint Charles Avenue is lined with oak trees whose broad branches drip Spanish moss and Mardi Gras beads from the pre-Lenten parades, and behind the oaks are beautiful old houses with turrets, porches, balconies, bay windows, gables, dormers and lush gardens. There are no refineries for miles, hardly even gas stations on the stretch I was on in mid-June, and the Deepwater Horizon rig that exploded on 20 April and the oil welling up a mile below it were dozens of miles away as the bird flies ...”

“... smelling to human nostrils of decay, ‘a sweet furry stink of just-beyond-edible food, and moss, and leather, and yeast’. Crow has a nose of his own, and assesses the widower’s bouquet with a wine columnist’s precision and panache: ‘notes of rotten hedge, bluebottles’. His relationship to his victim/client has a number of ...”

“... always much nastier about each other than any other people I know are about their colleagues,’ Sarah observes in A Summer Bird-Cage (1963), Drabble’s first novel. ‘I hate anyone to be didactic except me.’ ‘Sometimes it seems the only accomplishment my education ever bestowed on me, the ability to think in quotations.’In comparison with lines like ...”