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“... Where do you come from?’ asks one of the most important questions in contemporary poetry – where’s home? Answering the pulls and torsions of that question produces much of the verse of Heaney, Harrison and Dunn, but it also produces very different kinds of poetry. Martianism had nothing to do with Mars, everything to do with home, the place where Craig Raine (like Murray or Dunn) feels richest ...”

“... for the first time, as a volume in the Cambridge Edition of the Letters and Works of D.H. Lawrence.* It is an unfinished novel of 292 pages, of which only the first 93 have previously been printed. Lawrence wrote the book between May 1920, when he had just finished The Lost Girl, and some time in 1921. He gave up ...”

“... Monday, Ike postponed the operation for 24 hours, only two hours before the main body was due to sail. So Monday was out, and the troops in their landing-craft tossed uncomfortably at moorings. The decision had been an emotional drain on all the participants, military and meteorological, and the whole nerve-racking process had now to continue for yet another ...”

“... north of Iceland. From there, the Atlantic and its convoys would be wide open. Lutjens had to sail without the battlecruisers Gneisenau and Scharnhorst, both of which were being repaired at Brest, and the Bismarck’s sistership, the Tirpitz, which wasn’t yet ready. He told a friend: ‘In this unequal struggle between the British Navy and ourselves I ...”

“... outing to the races at Longchamps; ‘black-eyed Susan’, the New Mexican cow beloved by D.H. Lawrence: these are the things that stay in the mind when diagnoses and depreciations are forgotten. Jeffrey Meyers, who has done solid biographies of Lawrence and Hemingway and has now done one for Conrad, is particularly good ...”

“... sobering thought for writers who have been trying to clean up their act during the day, but for Lawrence Durrell as for Conrad adjectives don’t come back because they never left. If there is a mystery in Conrad it’s inscrutable, if there’s a tangle in Durrell it’s inextricable. And to stay with the latter: if there’s a treasury it’s ...”

“... and a half thousand miles from the South American coast in the vast, empty Pacific. They did not sail for the nearest land – the Marquesas, Tuamotu and Tahitian islands – which stretched from several hundred to two thousand miles away under their lee and would have made for easy downwind sailing. Afraid of encountering cannibals on these islands, they ...”

“... the stuff of parody, and pretty heavy-handed parody. Lots of it reads indeed like an attempt at a Lawrence pastiche. Language lesson: ‘She nodded in the direction of its [the ape’s] penis. “Cock,” she said. The ape stretched out an arm ... and eased it under her dress. “Pussy,” she said hoarsely, enlightening him.’ But Høeg apparently intends ...”

“... beach or by taking minor trips or otherwise agreeable spells abroad: Henry James in France, D.H. Lawrence in New Mexico, Lawrence Durrell in Corfu, Michel Butor in Istanbul, Henry Miller in Greece. In December 1933, leaving his father in Simla and his mother in London, Patrick Leigh Fermor set off to walk from the Hook of ...”

“... a novel for teenagers which made it clear that O’Brian knew his way around the age of sail. He had inserted two fictional Irish heroes into George Anson’s voyage around the world in the 1740s, and could do 18th-century diction without being bookish or stagey. The novel also showed he could be funny and knew how to tell a story. Not much was ...”

“... in it – fact that comes through poetry but is not just concocted in its context. Come aboard and sail away is as zestful as all John Fuller’s collections, but like his novel in verse, The Illusionists, it delights anyone with an ear and a taste for poetry rather than for truths and tales that short-circuit the poetic, as they do in Pushkin’s Evgeny ...”

“... gunwales, pouring in on both sides, one man bailing like mad, the rest paddling & yelling, & our sail like a map of the world in giant rips and holes, and those fish, unbelievable, their eyes glaring like orange torches – colour of the orange on traffic lights & just as bright, actually lit from the inside, very eerie & mysterious, hours after they were ...”

“... Viking sails were made of greased wool and it took about fifty sheep to provide the wool for one sail. The wool had to be spun and woven: heavy, co-operative work on a great Viking loom (the ‘Song of the Valkyries’ is in the form of a work song, but the web the Valkyries are weaving from human intestines is war and death). You would be wise to have a ...”

“... Cusk has glimpsed the central truth of modern life: that sometimes it is as sublime as Homer, a sail full of wind with the sun overhead, and sometimes it is like an Ikea where all the couples are fighting. ‘I wonder what became of the human instinct for beauty,’ she writes in The Last Supper, ‘why it vanished so abruptly and so utterly, why our race ...”

“... come about: the wonder is that it has come about at all. Fifty-eight years have passed since Major Lawrence Grand launched his ‘Section D’ in a niche of the old War Office, which had concluded, quite privately in the wake of the Munich sell-out of the Czechs, that a war with Hitler’s Germany would be unavoidable, in which case several European countries ...”