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“... one supermarket trolley, six chandeliers, seven TV sets, ten bicycles, and ‘a low-calorie Cessna light aircraft which he ate in Caracas, Venezuela’. There is a picture of the master at work, his swivelled eye and loony rictus suggesting that he has lately been at the Castrol Multigrade, robustly tucking into a bicycle wheel. This procedure seems to be ...”

“... first Wimbledon champion ever to wear shorts.’ Perhaps in deference to long trousers, he makes Donald Budge his tennis hero. He speaks well (perhaps in deference to his first name) of Budge Patty, but he is in the main more impressed by victorious than by winning players. Yet even his string of amateur victories does not redeem Fred Perry, whom Mr Kramer ...”

“... on Charlie Hebdo. The attack is part of a war declared on France, but can also be seen in the light of the wars France has got itself involved in: conflicts where its participation isn’t called for, where worse massacres than that at Charlie Hebdo take place every day, several times a day, where our bombardments pile death on death in the hope of saving ...”

“... new team would now castrate the whole project by removing exhibits that showed Poland in a poor light. They would replace ‘unhealthy cosmopolitan’ stuff with lists of Polish priests shot by communists. ‘See the show while it lasts,’ was the advice going round Gdańsk. But it hasn’t happened – not yet. The new director, Karol Nawrocki, said ...”

“... power to enrage Freudians; a book by the fact-checkers of the Washington Post listing the lies of Donald Trump (the only instance I can think of in which that shy fraternity has ventured into authorship); Deborah Lipstadt’s book on Holocaust denial; Daniel A. Farber’s Beyond All Reason: the Radical Assault on Truth in American Law (1997); and Fox Nation ...”

“... would not have been mentioned to the pupils of the primary school in Câmpina which my father, Donald Slomnicki, then seven and speaking only a smattering of Romanian, attended from the autumn of 1938. Behind every teacher in every classroom in every school loomed a portrait of the king and a map of Greater Romania, the perfect circle within ...”

“... of the waterfall coversThe cries of the whipped and the sighs of the loversAnd the hard bright light composesA meaningless moment into an eternal factWhich a whistling messenger disappears with into a defile:One enjoys glory, one endures shame;He may, she must. There is no one to blame.Except that this is not the way things happen, only the way we have ...”

“... in its bleak, social realist aspect. In a review of Fisher’s 1968 Collected from Fulcrum Press, Donald Davie found strong affinities between Fisher and Larkin, in particular the ‘piercing pathos’ and the way that Fisher restricts ‘himself as self-denyingly as Larkin to the urbanised and industrialised landscapes of modern England’. Davie goes on to ...”

“... Brancusi, even the prominent sculptors included in the upper P&S galleries (like David Smith and Donald Judd) are mostly pictorial in orientation; others that are not (and some that are) are placed outside in the Sculpture Garden or cast into the Contemporary Galleries. In fact most work to do with materiality and corporeality, let alone the formless and the ...”

“... Absorbed by darkness outwards from the beach, Like lemon ice licked by my younger daughter White light is ineluctably consumed, Ripples erased. Desired and therefore doomed. In Britain the health workers strike for pay Which surely in all conscience they’ve got coming. The harvest’s in and farmers stack the hay. Around the rotting fruit the wasps are ...”

“... and faith are likely to be a help. The point of anniversaries, I take it, is that they bring to light some music or some aspect of a man’s oeuvre hitherto neglected. Little composers are usually more in need than great ones. A Beethoven-Jahr does no one much good; a Wagner-Jahr no good to anyone. But, surprisingly, all three of ‘85 could do with some ...”

“... you, oh, it’s absolutely appalling, it can’t possibly work.’ Tom Sloan, the BBC’s Head of Light Entertainment at the time, was a cautious man who pondered, on reading the first script, ‘Were we making mock of Britain’s Finest Hour?’ His conversion was rapid. He was persuaded that everything was true; not only was pepper issued as a weapon, but ...”

“... hard evidence has led at least one academic researcher, Hal Brands, to conclude that ‘the green light thesis has more basis in myth than in reality.’ Chas Freeman, a distinguished US diplomat, recently provided me with a clue as to what might really have happened. In January 1981, as the Carter administration was preparing to leave office, Freeman, who ...”

“... edition of Shelley’s complete poetry, edited by Crook. The first three volumes, edited by Donald Reiman, Neil Fraistat, Crook and others, appeared in 2000, 2005 and 2012. As Crook explains, Reiman died in 2019 ‘after a long illness that had caused him to retire from his editorial role’. The publication sequence was disrupted; volumes ...”

“... peril. Certainly, Labour’s Scottish frontbenchers – Robin Cook (especially), Gordon Brown, Donald Dewar and, of course, John Smith himself – have a terse, combative Parliamentary style light-years from Mr Kinnock’s and this has earned them a grudging but general respect. Mr Smith was also thought (and plainly ...”