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“... Brendan Behan should be preferred over Elizabeth Bowen. Maybe Bowen wouldn’t look right on a pub wall. She seems to be not just the wrong gender but also the wrong class, the wrong religion. This sense of wrongness doesn’t adhere to Synge, Beckett, Swift, Goldsmith, O’Casey, Yeats, Shaw, or Wilde, who were all Protestant. There are three ...”

“... of a decommissioned rectory. This secret garden is separated from St Augustine’s Tower by a high wall of darkly weathered brick. The proud stub of the square tower is all that remains of Hackney’s oldest ecclesiastical building, a 16th-century revision of the 13th-century church founded by the Knights of St John. The Hole is a statement and it is properly ...”

“... Sex and the City’s creator and its second lead writer were gay men, Darren Star and Michael Patrick King, prompting one of the Girls cast, Jemima Kirke, to say of Dunham’s series: ‘It’s not Sex and the City … That’s four gay men sitting around talking.’ Meanwhile Issa Rae, the Black creator of HBO’s Insecure (2016-21), defended Dunham ...”

“... without spectacle’. It was Debord who scrawled ‘Ne Travaillez Jamais’ on the wall of the Ecole des Beaux Arts in 1953 to mark the frontier between the city as Situationist playground and capitalist work-camp. Other Situationists reported on ‘dérives’ as if they were military actions behind enemy lines and described how they had ...”

“... north Norfolk coast. Some edge of the golf course, out of season resort like Sheringham – where Patrick Hamilton dried out, on a regimen of no booze before lunchtime, Hopalong Cassidy novels, and the occasional glimpse from behind net curtains of schoolgirls on horseback. They should have known the real story, because it was there from the start. Staring ...”

“... Seamus Heaney so skilfully used in both his poems and his prose, he relates (in an essay on Patrick Kavanagh from 1985) that one of his aunts ‘planted a chestnut in a jam jar’ in the year of his birth. In due course the seedling was planted out and grew to a fine height. Heaney says that ‘over the years I came to identify my own life with the life ...”

“... doorway. The coats they unbutton to effect this, holding them together to form a sort of inner wall, make for an eroticism much sharper, much more modern, than in the Victorian novels. There’s nothing ‘frissony’ about it. It’s simply sex. The Duncan story, though diffuse and not entirely coherent, is shocking, ambitious, morally searching in a way ...”

“... that … life was fine’, she was ‘not/good at anything except standing still like a wall’. She can’t meet the family offer of ‘food for Christmas/and laughter and your life’.Troubled by insomnia, loneliness and alienation, Brand’s poetics become ‘more secretive, language/seemed to split in two, one branch fell silent, the ...”

“... west towards Islington, on a bright October morning, I was swallowed up, rammed against the wall, by 67 bicycles – yes, I counted – on the stretch between the Mare Street and Kingsland Road bridges. Ting ting, they sound their bells. Some from a residual sense of courtesy. Some as a kamikaze warning. Some with Mandelsonian disdain. British Waterways ...”

“... critically we are stitched into the particulars of the places where we choose to make our home. Patrick Keiller, a scrupulous observer from the misted windows of trains, added the Nine Elms Coal Hopper to his album of found architecture. The site was demolished in the winter of 1979-80, before being squatted by a car breaker. The Hopper lives on in ...”

“... the best picture The Taking of Christ on loan from Dublin, a superb painting but hung on the same wall as the National Gallery’s Supper at Emmaus. This is nowhere near as good because the central figures don’t compare. In the Dublin picture Christ with his downcast eyes is ascetic and noble (with Judas yearning and troubled). In the NG’s picture ...”

“... by the most prominent left-wing commentator in Britain, a Corbyn insider. Gabriel Pogrund and Patrick Maguire have assembled their book from an impressive array of interviews with key members of Corbyn’s team, as well as with others implacably opposed to his leadership. Where they primarily document the project’s disintegration between the 2017 and ...”

“... by Brexit that the parliamentary debate on its findings was attended by only a handful of MPs. Patrick Porter’s Blunder: Britain’s War in Iraq (2018) showed that responsibility lay with the British elite as a whole and couldn’t be limited to Blair. But Porter’s account also perpetuated the official story that the war ‘exposed the deadliness of ...”

“... continued nonetheless. (He began this last following a visit with Nancy Cunard to the Lascaux wall-paintings, themselves then newly come to light.) The two books in effect describe the political arc of Swingler’s life from pacifist-into-socialist Popular Front days, through class war, civil war, world war to postwar Labour Government and the faint ...”

“... flat into a brothel, Frank grows up spying on prostitutes and their clients through a hole in the wall. But although money, power and self-gratification seem the only values that matter in the world around him, he’s nevertheless fascinated by the wholesome ménage in the flat underneath his own, where a widower, Holst, lives with his 16-year-old ...”