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“... flash and sizzle.’ Bellow is not one of those purely imaginative writers like Golding or Ian McEwan who invent copiously and logically from first premises. You cannot imagine him wondering what it is like to be an ape married to a young woman writer who is having trouble with her second novel after the success of the first. Or wondering what might ...”

“... he fails to communicate the pressure of those times and their influence on Bunyan’s work. Noting Jack Lindsay’s statement that Bunyan’s The Holy War, published in 1682 near the end of Charles II’s reign, is a commentary on ‘absolutism against the liberties of the people’, Greaves asserts that this view ‘cannot be sustained’, but doesn’t ...”

“... character in the Henry VI plays (1590-92) is not an honourable warrior but the populist rebel Jack Cade, who has Lord Saye beheaded because ‘he can speak French, and therefore he is a traitor.’ The xenophobic rhetoric favoured by Cade is assigned to another repulsive character in the last of this sequence of histories, Richard III (1593), when before ...”

“... submitted their own short list of who they wished to see chair the Inquiry but the Home Secretary Jack Straw settled on his own man, Sir William Macpherson of Cluny, a retired High Court Judge. He was to be supported by John Sentamu, the Anglican Bishop of Stepney, Tom Cook, former Deputy Chief Constable of West Yorkshire, and Richard Stone, Chairman of the ...”

“... to fill in the spaces. The tone of it reminds me of the tone of Lowell’s conversation with Ian Hamilton from 1971, mechanically clever but distant and deaf, all denatured one-liners and musing rhetorical questions. It’s not conversation but the complacent burble of a radio on a windowsill. History is about as broad as Lowell gets, a custard-pie ...”

“... morning: “Get up and get the stink blown off ye.”’ In the National Gallery we looked at some Jack Yeats paintings and then went to the shop, where I pointed to a line of postcards featuring Seamus. He tutted. I took one down, a portrait painted by Edward McGuire in 1974. It showed a sullen, tousle-haired graduate of the bog. Karl immediately plucked a ...”

“... are five modern-looking barns and a house islanded in bushes. At the end of the garden a Union Jack flaps in the wind at the top of a pole. And on the day I came, there were many plums rotting on the trees.Michael Fordham, the farm’s owner, was driving a new JCB in and out of one of the barns, lifting grain into a waiting lorry. The farm where we stood ...”

“... Something had gone, some genuineness, some verve. Some energy and commitment. It was time to jack it in. That would have been 1971 or 1972. Then I went to America for a year. No. It felt like a year. I went to make some money and spent all of it while I was there.Was that when you met James Dickey?He played bluegrass music and he had this lake on his ...”

“... and then when I fixed I could say: ‘Hey, wait a minute! I gotta feed mah man! He’s hungry, jack!’ You know. ‘Come on, baby, I gotta go first. Mah man’s hungry. He needs some blood!’You can see some of the tattoos in the super-grotty ex-felon pic of him – a cadaverous Nan Goldin-style mug shot – on the cover of Art Pepper: Living Legend ...”

“... slight, pale, bearded soldier in cammos smoking outside a restaurant called Mafia. He had a Union Jack patch on his sleeve. I asked if he was British. He said he was from Scunthorpe. He used to be a shipbuilder, but, he said, he was ‘attracted to war’. He’d fought in Syria. Now he was serving with a Ukrainian unit in Kramatorsk in Donbas, about fourteen ...”

“... reading of the scant facts given might lead us to think he has in fact had an affair with Jack Barrett, the young working-class man he has repeatedly given lifts to late at night, but the emotional logic of the film requires us to take his word for it that he hasn’t: ‘I stopped seeing him because I wanted him.’ The snapshot taken with a ...”

“... digital effects like Gladiator’s, only more so. It has a proper cast, with proper stars in it: Ian McKellen as Gandalf, Cate Blanchett as Galadriel, Liv Tyler as Arwen Undómiel (the women’s parts have been beefed up somewhat). An acquaintance e-mailed to say he’d seen an early trailer in a cinema. He was so moved by the glorious sight, he cried.On the ...”

“... and on Instagram and Facebook, too. ‘I love England,’ she wrote in one post, next to a Union Jack, and ‘Live in London’, beside an emoji of a small house and a very green tree. She liked to imagine that one day she would live in a house like that with her husband, Hassan, and their two daughters. Hassan used to work at the mosque. Later on, when he ...”