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“... of course, a Chelsea Arts Ball gone crackers; it’s also, as Burra wrote on the back, a homage to Conrad Aiken, specifically to his poem ‘John Deth’: Come Millicent, my spangled queen! Come thump your shivering tambourine Burra got to know Aiken, who had lived in Rye on and off since 1924, through Paul Nash. Aiken became Burra’s connection to America ...”

“... the Comte d’Artois are going to descend on France with an army of about five thousand men in black clothes made from the cassocks of non-juring clergy and studded with death’s heads.’ These were not idle fears. In April 1792, an increasingly desperate Louis XVI gambled on war with Austria, calculating that victory might save his reputation and defeat ...”

“... at the bottom of the credits of a Peter Fonda biker movie, was the acceptable face of the black economy. He mingled with poets who dealt sugar-lumps laced with LSD. He met R.D. Laing, Lyall Watson and became involved with P.J. Proby’s management. He was, so he says, ‘trying to create an alternative society, like all the other arseholes.’ Which ...”

“... in London slums – ‘sinister courts where the police hesitated to penetrate, but where your black bag protected you from harm’ – to write Liza of Lambeth (1897), ‘a very clever realistic study of factory girl and coster life’, as his publisher’s reader put it. Further novels and a Spanish travel book followed, but they didn’t make much money ...”

“... certainly did so, whether because of his own deprived childhood – as glimpsed in “Baa Baa, Black Sheep’ – or just by temperament and inclination. Fate retaliated with the death in childhood of one of his daughters, and by killing his son in the First World War. Fate also saw to it that his capacity for hatred was as great as that for love: a hatred ...”

“... going a little far.’) And how quaint that the member who signs Dalgleish in should be called ‘Conrad Ackroyd’, a double blue plaque moniker. After Dalgleish has finished miming his usual prunelipped disapprobation for the morbid memorabilia, he shuts up and listens to Ackroyd, who ‘although he could be facetious, was seldom dull’. He was, after ...”

“... Office predicting what protesters would do next. In one report, a Special Branch chief inspector, Conrad Hepworth Dixon, claimed that the city faced the threat of demonstrators carrying ‘ball-bearings, fireworks, hat pins and banner poles for use as weapons’. Ministers considered deploying the army. Senior police officers assured the government they were ...”

“... He had brought along what I’d asked to see. And he pulled out a lined school jotter bound in black linen: there were the poems. They were all he had. They were thirty-odd in number. They filled the thin notebook with their beautiful, crisp handwriting, which ran smoothly and evenly, without anything unruly or fancy. It was rare for a single word to be ...”

“... Française. When the 77-year-old Yourcenar entered the Académie on 22 January 1981, wearing a black velvet double-layer cape designed by Yves Saint Laurent, she looked severe, as if she had spent her life as a nun in service to literature. Head swathed in white silk, she was not only forbidding – in her speech to the Académie that day she pronounced ...”

“... the day of his extraordinary speech in the House of Lords likening commercial broadcasting to the Black Death. It was as if I’d said to the present Chief of the Defence Staff that I’d met the first Duke of Wellington.15 March 1994. A reply arrives from John Major to a letter I’d written to him trying to persuade him to reform the House of Lords. It ...”

“... in the film. They meet at the roller-coaster, talk business, take a ride. Slater, who has a shaggy black crew cut, and talks and grins like Jack Nicholson without a mind, is shown full face on the swooping ride, delighted, obviously having such an uncomplicated good time that he has entirely forgotten his drug sale and its dangers and his prospects. Or if he ...”

“... in many novelists today, particularly younger ones, who recognise the current literary value of a black world view but themselves possess cheerful, even sunny temperaments. They turn out The Good Companions in reverse, well aware that their escapist world will seem as convincing to today’s readers as Priestley’s did to subscribers in the Thirties. The ...”

“... but – as Michael Straight immediately recognised – in the spirit of the world described by Conrad in Under Western Eyes. On this day, not long after John Cornford had been killed in the fighting near Cordoba, Anthony Blunt invited Straight to his rooms and said: ‘Some of your friends have different ideas for you.’ Michael Straight at first rejected ...”

“... Eliot affected to be. Of his own early relationship with Pound, Eliot merely noted in a letter to Conrad Aiken that Pound was ‘rather intelligent as a talker’, though ‘his verse is well-meaning but touchingly incompetent’. By contrast, Lawrence confided enthusiastically to one of his girlfriends that Pound ‘knows W.B. Yeats – all the ...”

“... campers at Indio in 1939, threatening to throw them out if they did not obey regulations. In 1941 Conrad Reibold, manager at Firebaugh, reported that participation in camp democracy was so half-hearted as to make positions on the camp council impossible to fill. Shindo’s analysis delivers a few hits, but from an odd perspective. You could say that there was ...”