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“... and politics and marches were forbidden. I was 16, or 16 and a half, and still at school when I read in the papers that a black American, Jimmy Wilson, had been sentenced to death for stealing a dollar. I can still recall that moment of deep shock. We couldn’t believe it. Even if he’d stolen a million, executing him was a bit much. So I got a few ...”

“... interviewers, was ‘like opening a gate … the minute I opened it and saw the photographs, and read the text, I knew there was going to be yield from it.’Heaney had already been drawn to write boggy things. In the delightful poem ‘Bogland’ in Door into the Dark (1969) he had eulogised the preservative genius of the land: ‘Butter sunk under/More ...”

“... a sad and puzzled coda: ‘Forgive the zeal/That, too presumptuous, whisper’d better things/And read the book of destiny amiss.’ Anyhow, Priestley adored the poem, and read it to an admiring audience at the London Coffee House which included Boswell, on whose account of the struggle Barbauld had based her ...”

“... would decide whether to authorise publication or not, as he saw fit. In any case, he would have read them all himself. Once in France, Swinton was alarmed by German superiority in artillery: If our resourceful, industrious and well-equipped opponents were able to accomplish so much in haste and with improvised means, what might they not do, given ...”

“... his mother said, ‘and gave us a military salute as he disappeared behind the door.’ She had read a piece in the Spectator that described the departing soldiers as modern crusaders, but she felt ‘there is something that they have that no crusader ever had, and it was shining in V.D.’s face today.’ Fernald’s ship docked at Le Havre, from where he ...”

“... subject to delays. The obscure origins of the University are carefully reconstructed. In Sir Richard Southern’s distinction, Oxford was not ‘created’ – it ‘emerged’. The contributors explain the significance of its geographical location and its importance as a centre of legal activity. They discuss how it separated from the town and the ...”

“... have tended to feel either hagiographic or hostile. The famous early masterpiece of debunking was Richard Schickel’s The Disney Version, published in 1968 and a product of that anti-establishment end-of-decade. Loveable Uncle Walt had been dead for less than two years. Schickel’s work is still superbly readable and shrewd even when it is deeply unfair; it ...”

“... were didactic – ‘one of the things they were about was the indisposability of plastic.’ Richard Deacon, who is with Cragg ‘the most expensive, the most written about, the best patronised ... of the new British sculptural establishment’, makes startling hybrids: ‘To produce one of his small sculptures an old brass navigational aid must have ...”

“... must have about defending trees. For like the rest of us, they live in wooden houses, read and write books made of paper, and cut down trees in their gardens purely for aesthetic convenience. They are even willing to bargain with the timber industry, about logging so many trees and no more. These attitudes would be incomprehensible on the ...”

“... its works. Some astonishing remarks are made in this connection, the opinion that Dr Johnson ‘read nothing’ being the most spectacular. Richard Brinsley Sheridan is another plagiarist; Pope was a complete hypocrite; Kant was another who ‘had never read a book’; Goethe was simply ...”

“... in the early Seventies for what the Establishment called his bizarre and repulsive views on Richard Nixon and the 1972 Presidential campaign he constituted a real problem for the American press – specifically, those pundits, political tastemakers, and powerbrokers who lived within the pernicious confines of the Beltway that surrounds Washington. Doc ...”

“... in Alexandria, and even his most enthusiastic supporters concede that Apollonius was never easy to read. Sometimes you find yourself watching him unpick the best he has achieved. A famous simile compares Medea’s flickering passion for Jason to the light ‘glancing off the surface of just-poured water in a sunlit cauldron, or alternatively’, Apollonius ...”

“... presented as a genealogy. This lineage of poets (who not coincidentally are now hardly ever read) – Flecknoe, Mac Flecknoe aka Thomas Shadwell, Colley Cibber, piddling Theobald, Richard Blackmore – teems through the Grub Street grunge of Pope’s greatest poem, the mock-heroic satire on books and fools and ...”

“... as Sir Edward Coke did, was deluded antiquarianism. Hobbes’s Philosopher says: ‘Truly, I never read weaker reasoning in any author of the law of England than in Sir Edward Coke’s Institutes how well so ever he could plead.’ The royalist historian-physician Robert Brady remarks sourly that Coke ‘hath a fine fetch to play off the Great Charter and ...”

“... generations. He also scoured his bottom drawer for material. The longest of the lives, that of Richard Savage, was substantially a reprint of a monument to a feckless and garrulous friend that Johnson had published in 1744. Johnson’s critique of Pope’s epitaphs from 1756 was appended to his ‘Life of Pope’, even though it provides an incongruously ...”