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“... a man called Tommy Stadlen. The unwanted return left his pregnant wife ‘waist-high in a sea of grey-brown liquid’. A posse of bedraggled rats had washed up in a neighbour’s flat. A month’s supply of rain had fallen in ninety minutes. Embattled water companies, with a duty to tend the profit curves of their shareholders, hide behind a monsoon of ...”

“... and simply has the corpses pecked by ‘crows and shrikes’. Jean Calais – a pseudonym for Stephen Rodefer – is Villon’s most interesting ‘translator’. Running casually between version and imitation, Rodefer makes every tactical misprision that it’s possible to make. The result feels faithful in the broadest sense. Where, at the end of ...”

“... up ahead. At the far end, between one rocky outcrop and the shore, I find a deep pool in the grey, silty, slightly sulphurous sand – this is the Black Strand. I remember from childhood how hill folk used to come to Narin’s great sweeping strand and stand all day at the head of the strand in a sulphur spring, their dark trousers rolled up or frocks ...”

“... making people throb with awakenedness.‘Instead of the philosophy being the clue to Lawrence,’ Stephen Potter wrote in 1930, ‘it will be Lawrence who is the clue to the philosophy.’ Almost a century later, Wilson takes a similar tack, although she is clearly not much taken with the philosophy in its own right: ‘For all his claims to prophetic ...”

“... 1916’: I have met them at close of day Coming with vivid faces From counter or desk among grey Eighteenth-century houses.The poem’s repeated refrain, ‘All changed, changed utterly:/A terrible beauty is born,’ expresses a recognition that is frequently misunderstood. The poet is not celebrating a radical new turn in Irish affairs brought about by ...”

“... many long, and covered with loose pieces of pumice about as big as a man’s head. A sort of pale grey thorn scrub, and a few camels eating it. A sort of green shrub, much rarer, and a goat or two eating that. A second daughter, Roudaba, was born on Tenerife in 1934, but mostly Bunting was pretty wretched. He wrote to Pound that ‘the people of this island ...”

“... on Christmas Day 1883, aged 21, she stopped to consider herself: What am I? A little woman with grey eyes with corners to them … & a nose with a lump in the middle, & a square jaw and a nameless complexion with small ears almost round & an ordinary neat figure & next to no legs. Is there anything in the outside? Well come in, what is there here? A quick ...”

“... from colonial rule into statehood, or in the case of some American holdings, towards a convenient grey zone between colony and military base. In this utopia the US was to be at once the summa of world history, never to be equalled, and the model that would have to be followed. The planners drafted blueprints for the United Nations as a way to package ...”

“... meadow bordered with rich, green, swaying trees, cut by a savage wind, needled with driving rain, grey cloud looming over. Cheerfully, quickly, methodically, they roll the banners, for they are expensive banners . . . bought with the weekly threepences and sixpences of working men. Four men . . . noticeable for their gaunt and bitter aspect, maimed and ...”

“... wall. The staff wear their own clothes and are not afraid to give new arrivals a hug. Polmont is grey and clinical. He would have been met and searched by uniformed officers … But it would have been walking into the wing that scared him most: the rows of cells, the clatter and – coming from Glasgow with its territorial warfare – the not knowing who ...”

“... arresting picture of a writer in Peterley Harvest is that of A.E. Housman delivering his Leslie Stephen Lecture, ‘The Name and Nature of Poetry’. Every fact that Pennington uses, from the date and the time to the presence of Quiller-Couch and Will Spens, the Vice-Chancellor, may once more be checked from works subsequently published, such as The Letters ...”

“... culture and language may actually affect perception, thought and cognition,’ Horacio Fabrega and Stephen Tyma wrote in 1976, ‘then to that extent they may also affect the actual experience of pain.’ In the West, when the humoral theory of bodily function was extant, pains were often described as migratory, like the humours themselves. Steam engines ...”

“... and wrap gleaming like gold armour. Her nails were nicely manicured and painted a sort of pearl grey. She seemed scared in general and nervous in particular, but I think I understood it was probably just her thing, this immense sense of smallness, the distance and resignation in her eyes that flew away as soon as she smiled. When Didion laughs she laughs ...”

“... reflection, that maybe it can’t. Hence the current perplexity. History might reasonably credit Stephen J. Gould and Richard Lewontin as the first to notice that something may be seriously wrong in this part of the wood. Their 1979 paper, ‘The Spandrels of S. Marco and The Panglossian Paradigm: A Critique of the Adaptationist Programme’, ignited an ...”

“... the neighbourhood, then through the back, catching the door before it closed behind a woman in a grey business suit. Charlie followed me and sat like a gentleman. She gave him a look of withering contempt. Had she mistaken Charlie for another, very similar looking, Texas Catahoula, named Smut, then notorious in certain parts of the state for swimming in ...”