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“... operetta based on a play by none other than Lady Frazer (called, appropriately enough, The Singing Wood) and a display of indoor fireworks. Frazer himself, according to the reports, claimed to have been ‘particularly charmed’ by the fireworks – but, as he was by this date completely blind, one suspects a certain irony in the remark, perhaps even an ...”

“... de Fête’, one of the last poems she’d published, copied out in Hardy’s hand. Her friend Sydney Cockerell had found it among Hardy’s things a few months earlier and sent it on, adding that ‘we found no other poem of any sort copied out by T.H.’ Mew wrote to thank him for ‘the poem which no one else I think thought other than jingle’. It ...”

“... like the comb people have for carding wool after the sheep-shearing – it’s just a bit of wood with some nails through it, really, and a handle. It does the work in half the time. You just comb the branches.’‘Is that so?’ Barba Stavro was as impressed as though he were learned of the discovery of steam power for the first time. When they had ...”

“... the head of the Senate’s Select Committee on Intelligence, said in a written statement for the Sydney Morning Herald earlier this month that he had indeed ‘caused serious harm to US national security and he should be prosecuted accordingly.’ That might mean little in an election year, but what of the alarming trove of email traffic at Stratfor, the ...”

“... cared to admit. In a letter to Felice Bauer he indulges in the fantasy of being a large piece of wood, pressed against the body of a cook ‘who is holding the knife along the side of this stiff log (somewhere in the region of my hip) slicing off shavings to light the fire’. Many conclusions could be drawn from this image, some glibber than others. One of ...”

“... milieu of 1950s Edinburgh. For a time, Brown mixed there with Hugh MacDiarmid, Norman MacCaig, Sydney Goodsir Smith and other poets and literati. With its prostitutes and smoky, male-dominated pubs sporting signs which stated ‘Women Not Supplied’, Rose Street was a shithole of gender politics, emblematic in some ways of the Edinburgh that Muriel Spark ...”

“... many such disarming testimonies. ‘Nothing could be kinder than both Mr and Mrs Tennyson,’ Sydney Dobell wrote, ‘he in his great blind superhuman manner, like a colossal child.’ Jowett, while keen to emphasise his friend’s manly virtues, nevertheless acknowledged that ‘he is as open as the day, and, like a child, tells any chance comer what is ...”

“... biographer to ignore ... all these sights and the garden sounds too, the hammer beating and the wood chopping, began that riot and confusion of the passions and emotions which every good biographer detests.’ There had been a number of experiments in the late 1920s and early 1930s – among them Harold Nicolson’s delightful vignettes Some People, Lytton ...”

“... is to take place ...’ He sat at the end of my bed and mentioned Paris and Vienna and Toronto and Sydney and, of course, Chicago. He looked pleased on my behalf. ‘Naturally, this is a partnership,’ he explained. ‘You gain, we gain. We gain foreign currency from the sale of your work. Your government will have some ... discreet money. We will pay it into ...”

“... descriptive reality’ – 1984) vaults from the page. Born in 1938, Hughes grew up in a prominent Sydney family (ranching, law, politics – a grandfather was Lord Mayor), dropped out of university (having studied architecture) in 1962, went to Italy the following year and to London in 1967, then settled permanently in New York in 1970, having been hired as ...”

“... thoughts against thoughts in groans grind. For too long, Bishop had lived these moral choices of life/death, right/wrong, male/female: but at last, the early happy years with Lota had made them seem irrelevant, and Bishop, longing for Paradise since her blighted childhood, felt she had found it at Santarém: That golden evening I really wanted to go no farther; more than anything else I wanted to stay awhile in that conflux of two great rivers ...”

“... and resourceful, Gordon has interviewed many witnesses, and had the cooperation of Maurice Haigh-Wood, Vivien’s brother; she draws on Vivien’s diaries in the Bodleian, the copyright of which, as we learn from the Letters, belongs to Eliot’s widow. And, familiar with virtually all the archives, she has read a great many of the letters. Her ...”

“... film, A Hard Day’s Night; an essay by Eula Biss referring to Paul McCartney and ‘Norwegian Wood’; McCartney sporting a man bun during his lockdown vacation; rave reviews for McCartney’s new lockdown solo album; various reflections on the fiftieth anniversary of George Harrison’s All Things Must Pass; various reflections on the fortieth ...”

“... supper party to which some grand guests had been invited, including the governor of Jamaica, Sir Sydney Olivier, who brought three of his four beautiful daughters (Laurence Olivier was their younger cousin). He already knew two of the sisters but now he met the youngest, 15-year-old Noel – he helped her pick up the fragments of the small green coffee cup ...”

“... presumably dead. I have never heard of her. 2 September. In a piece in the LRB on Buñuel Michael Wood mentions among ‘a number of startling and now famous images’ in Viridiana ‘a small crucifix’ that ‘flicks open to become a menacing knife’. The film came out in 1961 but I didn’t see it until some time in the 1970s after Buñuel’s much more ...”