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“... which pub, and young Karl was introduced to the mighty poets of Milne’s Bar and the Abbotsford: Hugh MacDiarmid, Norman MacCaig and Robert Garioch, among others. MacIver played some of the part of a father, taking Karl all over town to whatever was happening on stage or on screen. MacCaig was to become a lifelong friend, guide and admirer; they shared the ...”

“... than it did in the US army’s penal system. The opening paragraphs of the relevant chapter in Hugh Kenner’s The Pound Era (1971) read like an extract from the script for a Hollywood biopic (‘they existed from today’s exercise liberty to tomorrow’s, from this meal to the next: the heavy padlock opened, the door swung a little to admit the tin plate ...”

“... state. The State of Nature, meanwhile, was itself a site of conflict. The reductive party, with Thomas Hobbes at its head, saw human motivation as entirely egoistic at root (Hobbes’s problem was to explain how a mass of competing egos came up in the end with a system of law which protects the weak multitude). Locke’s State of Nature was much less ...”

“... in late August or early September 1617, came the eccentric English author, polyglot and traveller Thomas Coryate. He was a smallish, bearded man with a long, rather lugubrious face – ‘the shape of his head’, according to one description, was ‘like a sugar-loaf inverted, with the little end before’. He wore simple native clothes, and was thin to the ...”

“... MacDonald, accompanied by Philip Snowden, chancellor in both Labour governments, and J.H. Thomas, colonial secretary in 1924, joined the National Government dominated by the Conservatives. After that, the shortcomings of the 1924 government came to be regarded as a rehearsal for the more profound betrayal of 1931. The Labour government elected in ...”

“... idiosyncratic and contradictory way, he chose to do both. His reputation has suffered as a result. Thomas Hardy and British Poetry was first published in 1972, and written in California, where Davie had taken up a professorship at Stanford. With the Grain reprints the Hardy book in its entirety, along with a number of essays, directly or obliquely ...”

“... then and later, to develop any consistent style for Scots prose guaranteed its demise. Both Thomas Crawford, writing on 18th-century Scots verse, and Hamish Henderson, on the ballads, stress the interplay between Scots and English. While the poetry Crawford deals with does not, perhaps, travel well outside of Scotland, his sympathetic and honest account ...”

“... in post-war fiction? Alas, it ‘resists demystification’ in ‘a novel of 1940’ by Leslie Thomas, and survives another novel which shows how ‘by debunking the Myth component by component ... you end up with the same pattern.’ At the end the Myth beats Angus Calder on points. He doesn’t know, or at least is not able to convey or define, the ...”

“... eyes and began to throb like a motor-boat. May one suggest there is also a case for investigating Thomas Earle Welby (1881-1933), whose single entry in the Oxford Book of Quotations survived the second edition shakeout and is now in the third: ‘ “Turbot, sir,” said the waiter, placing before me two fishbones, two eyeballs and a bit of black ...”

“... of Presumption were accompanied by an adaptation of Polidori’s The Vampyre with the actor Thomas Cooke in both lead roles. It was the original horror double-bill. By the end of the century they had started to merge: a musical burlesque called Frankenstein, or The Vampire’s Victim was put on in London in 1887. When Abbott and Costello met ...”

“... loves America and its poetry but does not live there. At one point Davie defends Pound’s poem Hugh Selwyn Mauberley, and his own arguments about it, against an adverse critic. ‘For this sort of Englishman, “externality” – to things English – is what any American is condemned to; and per contra “inwardness” – with things English – is what ...”

“... add a little of the ‘I can’t go on, I go on’ of Beckett and a lot of the run-on ranting of Thomas Bernhard, a contemporary whom the Gaddis surrogate here accuses of plagiarism before the fact. (Agapē Agape does recall Concrete, a Bernhard novel about a writer unable to begin a biography of a composer.) In the end, as the dying man works to get his ...”

“... be in with a chance in the ‘Best Modernist Title’ category. The parallax effect is defined by Thomas Browne in the poem’s epigraph: ‘Many things are known as some are seen, that is by Paralaxis, or at some distance from their true and proper being.’ As an optical metaphor, ‘paralaxis’ has huge potential for the poet interested in the ...”

“... Swynford, the children of all three unions – as well as Katherine’s by her first husband, Sir Hugh Swynford – became one large blended family. Chaucer’s wife, Philippa, was Katherine’s sister, and so their children became part of this ménage. Thomas, his eldest son, was born around the same time as Henry ...”

“... The play concludes with the future Elizabeth I’s christening, during which her godfather, Thomas Cranmer, the archbishop of Canterbury, is inspired to prophesy:In her days every man shall eat in safety,Under his own vine, what he plants; and singThe merry songs of peace to all his neighbours:God shall be truly known; and those about herFrom her shall ...”