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“... rather than poet, and compares Genet (‘in this respect only’) with Nabokov and Tennessee Williams, ‘whose actual poetry is sentimental but whose prose – animated by suspense, dramatised through conflict, particularised by characters and aerated by dialogue – owes its brilliant sheen to its romantic diction’. This is convincing, and we might ...”

“... has never occurred to him’); a haunting, repeated definition of Hell borrowed from Charles Williams (‘nobody is ever sent to hell; he, or she, insists on going there’). There is a letter to the Sunday Times correcting the suggestion that Auden had snubbed Guy Burgess when he was in disgrace. It was true, Auden said, that he had been out when ...”

“... published An ‘Objectivists’ Anthology in 1932, A Novelette and Other Prose by William Carlos Williams, and two books by Pound: How to Read and The Spirit of Romance. It was while the Oppens were in Europe that the word ‘Objectivist’ came into existence. Pound had foisted Zukofsky on Harriet Monroe as a guest editor of Poetry for an issue which ...”

“... social relations sustaining them has been analysed before, and more persuasively, by Raymond Williams and others: Pugh adds little more except page after page of Barthesian whimsy. Eager to translate the language of gardens into the terminology of every prestigious anti-Enlightenment thinker, he embraces the paranoid vocabulary of Foucault’s work on ...”

“... R.: ‘Yeah. Difficult, northern and a cunt.’ 2 September. I am reading the second volume of Michael Palin’s diaries, which regularly feature the film producer Denis O’Brien. He produced A Private Function, which was made on a shoestring, the funds promised for the film regularly siphoned off for a more favoured O’Brien production, Water, which was ...”

“... With no more murmurs in the Liberal ranks In Labour’s there is total consternation. If Michael Foot tore out his hair in hanks He could not look more prone to perturbation. The right wing loudly calls the left wing cranks And no one stays calm in the altercation Except for Tony Benn, who sucks contentedly On his prop pipe and stares ahead ...”

“... for his long-standing support of left-wing policies in relation to the EEC and to disarmament, Michael Foot owes his recent election as leader mainly to the fact that he is loved, admired and trusted as an unswerving democrat by colleagues from end to end of the Parliamentary Party; and he certainly sees his role as that of conciliator in the party’s ...”

“... tailor. He won a scholarship to the Royal College of Music in 1911 and studied under Vaughan Williams, who recognised the genius of his early song-settings. Gurney’s mental instability was already apparent when war interrupted his studies. He served as a private in France and wrote his first volume of poems before being wounded, gassed and finally sent ...”

“... read this one by Mariani, a serial biographer of poets (he has notched already, among Americans, Williams, Crane, Lowell and Berryman), I don’t feel much the better for it. I got more, qua biography, from the bare bones of the 11-page chronology in the Library of America edition of Stevens; or from the brisk 15-page sketch called ‘Wallace Stevens: A ...”

“... incongruous inner ring of like-minded persons, including Tolkien, a Catholic convert, and Charles Williams, a Cockney original with a decidedly creepy inner life, and an extraordinary talent for updating the mystico-religious poetic attitudes of the Fin-de-Siècle. Thus was born the Inklings, an unexclusive but very characteristic group of like-minded ...”

“... triumph of the cult of personality is that it can expose its emptiness without losing its magic. Michael Rogin’s brilliant collection of essays, ‘Ronald Reagan’, the Movie, and Other Episodes in Political Demonology, attempts to account for and destroy this magic by restoring the two dimensions it has effaced: history and psychic interiority. The title ...”

“... attention. We have the story of the actor’s coughing off the stage a melodrama based on Caleb Williams; and a just appraisal of Mrs Siddons’s superior powers as a performer. We hear of her brother, with his poor singing voice, ‘murdering’ Grétry – the word is the Irish tenor Michael Kelly’s – and we witness ...”

“... so much ‘meaty pay dirt’ as the stuff of daytime television with odd touches of Tennessee Williams: He looks so sweaty and ugly, which, I mean we all do when we are desperate and looked at with no feeling, I know that. Desire makes us ugly unless the other person is lost to it too … It is like watching a movie. But it is me, I feel this ...”

“... it, as though the duffing-up were more important than dealing with Orwell’s own writing. Raymond Williams is taken behind the bike sheds for a particularly nasty going-over; repetition of another kind adds to the problem here, since the substance of this long section was first delivered at the Hay-on-Wye literary festival in 1999 (as the Raymond ...”

“... and mysteriously resigned as Premier. The list, written down by Wilson’s éminence grise, Marcia Williams, on her lavender-coloured writing paper, consisted almost entirely of rich right-wing businessmen who supported the Tory Party. It included the Lord High Buccaneer from Milnsbridge, James Hanson. When Thatcher was returned as Prime Minister in ...”