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“... seems to try to render in exact terms. Most contemporary American poetry wants only to offer what Helen Vendler has called ‘an interior state clarified in language’. ‘Clarified’ is an ambiguous word here, meaning the poetry’s effort to achieve the effect of being clear on the page. In Ashbery’s case the wordage trembles with a perpetual delicacy ...”

“... commonplace and the customary. In Carn, Patrick McCabe describes three decades in the life of a small Irish community. Carn is a small town situated half a mile from the Irish border, a town honoured in Republican annals for the heroism of Commandant Matt Dolan, shot dead in 1922 during a raid on the railway. Dolan has ...”

“... generous proportion of the proceeds to help good causes in the arts; perhaps even make a small but entirely uncalled-for donation to Tony Churt himself. At the moment of this fantasy, Martin doesn’t even know whether the painting is a Bruegel or not, hasn’t shared his guess with Kate, his recently married but long-suffering wife, and is ...”

“... health challenge of asymptomatic Covid-19 transmission. The need for testing was such that our small team was soon on Zoom calls with Silicon Valley startups, the California Covid-19 Testing Task Force, Admiral Brett Giroir (the US testing tsar) and the White House task force (two guys sharing a bedsit in San Francisco). We suggested to executives at Apple ...”

“... and moved to the slums. New converts to a ‘simple life’, they tinted the walls of their small house, waxed the uncarpeted floors and improvised furniture, hoping to set an aesthetic example to their neighbours. The drawing-room gatherings and expensive clothes of their former lives now seemed ‘as dross’. On a January morning the following year ...”

“... Bella, who is 17, has recently moved from sunny Arizona to live with her single father in Forks, a small town on the Olympic Peninsula, well known, apparently, for its rain and dullness: it’s ‘literally my personal hell on earth’. There, she falls in love with Edward Cullen, one of a small sect who call themselves ...”

“... it is obvious she was very fond of him and regretted the breakdown of her marriage. Her narrator, Helen, says: ‘I dream about Ned, as I am to dream about him for years and years to come. In these dreams he is always angry and I am always sad.’ That summer of 1990, as we drove about East Hampton and Amagansett on our way to swim or shop, Janet would ...”

“... to come forward from the cast of sad sacks. ‘Victory Lap’ is about two teenage neighbours in a small town. Alison, three days short of her 15th birthday, is a Little Miss Perfect who thinks ‘everyone is a rainbow,’ except perhaps her hometown suitors: ‘she felt hopeful that {special one} would hail from far away. The local boys possessed a certain je ...”

“... will be no dancing, no music, no dreaming tonight. There will only be a bollocking. Here, the small scale of the story is its point, its tiny observations a strength. Even more important, it shows no signs of having been written to order. A sense that the writers were not at work with a photocopied manifesto tacked up above their desks marks out the other ...”

“... with The Infinitesimals, in between.) Kasischke’s poems let some of us say about them what Helen Vendler once said about the early books of Adrienne Rich: ‘someone my age was writing down my life.’ Kasischke has chronicled her generation, the generation where wild kids learned to smoke, and then learned, as adults, never to smoke: the memory of ...”

“... allowed to attend university, and has worked – multitasking, in the manner of gifted people in small populations – as a teacher, magazine editor, journalist and screenwriter. Currently she is research director at the Institute of Studies of Communist Genocide in Albania, which one wishes for the author’s sake might be a sinecure, but almost certainly ...”

“... shopfronts, but you could walk into the Regal, ‘buy’ a ticket and take a seat in front of a small screen. The transport museum has since been rehoused and the Kelvin Hall is a strange combination of leisure centre and museum collections. When I visited in March, three large folders were waiting for me on a trolley. The earliest documents are from ...”

“... the life and all the works, if you are properly to grasp his importance. Here, though, there is small danger of his simply or routinely rehandling the facts, and this book, for all its oddness, is much better Burgess than its predecessor, partly because Burgess himself comes into it a lot, having a much livelier relationship with Lawrence than with St ...”

“... sellers have to innovate continuously and do so faster than their rivals. The best way is through small entrepreneurial groups linked to trusted brands. At their core are talented geeks and shrinks, in ever greater demand. The enterprise must also continuously cut costs, pushing down wages of routine workers, and flattening all hierarchies into fast-changing ...”

“... swathed in a mantle of the deepest sable, an allegory of Winter. This costume book, kept in a small museum in Brunswick, the Herzog Anton Ulrich, has elements of another popular print series: Schwarz’s poses might seem to be setting out the Ages of Man. Although the album is the result of an individual’s unprecedented interest in the phases of his own ...”