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“... work up much enthusiasm for the post-Olsonian outpourings of the Seventies, most notably Allen Fisher’s Place, Place was set largely south of the river, a nowhere defined by unnecessary particulars. Now Roy Fisher, he could do something with him – but the man had the poor taste to base his mythology on Birmingham. My problem was the contrary ...”

“... I don’t own a computer, have no idea how to work one,’ Woody Allen told an interviewer recently. Most of us have come to find computers indispensable, but he manages to have a productive life without one. Are those of us with computers really better off? There are two ways that computers might add to our wellbeing ...”

“... major environmentally conscious monograph to appear in Irish Studies only edges onto the land. Nicholas Allen’s Ireland, Literature and the Coast explores the maritime and watery dimensions of the country, from an early novel by W.B. Yeats through the scrapbooks and paintings of his brother, Jack, and on through periodicals and poetry from Sean ...”

“... between them. The effect of all this is altogether too cosy and reminded me of a passage in Woody Allen’s Stardust Memories. Sandy (‘Woody Allen’) has hit on ‘a very remarkable idea for a new ending’ for his movie: Sandy: We’re, we’re on a train and there are, there are many sad people on it, you ...”

“... but more properly a ‘limner’, a painter of works in watercolour. The best-known limner was Nicholas Hilliard, who held a monopoly given by Queen Elizabeth ‘to make portraits . . . of our body and person in small compass in limning only’. Kim Sloan explains in the catalogue (British Museum, £25) that ‘Hilliard would never have described himself ...”

“... he was teaching history of art at Birkbeck, was he able to take it up again with the support of Allen Lane, the founder of Penguin. After two years’ preliminary research, Pevsner and his wife set off with a permit for 30 gallons of petrol to tour Middlesex in a borrowed Wolseley Hornet.At first most of the work was done with the help of fellow ...”

“... giving things a name.’ Antonioni is admired for his ‘establishment of distance’ and Woody Allen for the ‘rarefaction of images and particularly of angles … theorised in Annie Hall’. What Charlie Chaplin’s little barber is saying in The Great Dictator comes from somewhere that might be nowhere. Daney’s summary of the speech is: ‘Whatever I ...”

“... one for public consumption. When Homage to Mistress Bradstreet was completed, five years later, Allen Tate, Lowell and others gave its studied historicism and technical effects unqualified approval. Berryman’s reputation was made, but his best work was still to come. The poem involves a modern, gnostic poet, for whom nothing is more important than writing ...”

“... Christopher Hitchens has been shouting at many of these people on conservative talk shows. Keith Allen, who travelled to Kansas earlier this year to make a Channel 4 programme about the founders of the ‘God Hates Fags’ website, ended up screaming ‘Fool!’ at his host. Hedges tells us that ‘debate is useless’ and warns that ‘tolerance coupled ...”

“... the coexistence in Elizabethan court politics of essential harmony and potential rivalry. Nicholas Hilliard’s portrait of Robert Dudley (1576) The limitations on Elizabethan governance were not different from those faced by many governments in other times and places. The queen’s advisers sought plausible, easy and cheap solutions to complex and ...”

“... of an English Country House: St Giles House (2018), Kirk had learned that the new earl, the 12th, Nicholas Ashley-Cooper, had in 2012 returned with his wife, Dinah, from an expatriate life as a night-club proprietor and DJ in New York and set about restoring the family seat to its former splendour. The Rebirth of an English Country House, written by the new ...”

“... wine trade at the British Library later that day. That older trade tends to be skated over. Nicholas Faith’s The Winemasters of Bordeaux (1978) begins, more or less, with Pepys’s visit to the Royal Oak Tavern on Lombard Street in 1663, where he encountered ‘a sort of French wine, called Ho Bryan, that hath a good and most particular taste that I ...”

“... he warned, but those who ‘accept Erasmus as a guide will not wander far out of the way’. P.S. Allen’s edition of the Letters, and Toronto’s elegant translation of them, makes that true still. Events unroll, week by week, without the perversions of hindsight. Erasmus shows himself a good judge of character. In the 1530s many in France and England came ...”

“... or of Cocteau or Fritz Lang or von Sternberg or Arthur Penn or Pasolini or Warhol or Woody Allen, nor a film directed or choreographed by Busby Berkeley, nor, amazingly, a film starring either Garbo or Fred Astaire, nor Shoah. Instead, it finds room for The Quiet Man and The Bridge on the River Kwai, three films by Nicolas Roeg and four by Powell and ...”

“... times at his house, and mentored James Angleton, the future CIA head of counterintelligence. As Allen Dulles later said, Philby had the keys to the CIA safe. An internal investigation was inconclusive. He was asked to tender his resignation and, according to his highly unreliable autobiography, My Silent War, he tried to make a living as a freelance ...”