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“... fox brought? ‘It was a nest of pink newborn mice – all he had found to bring home in a long day’s hunting.’ Rifles and ammunition were never far from hand. ‘We were raised to hunt,’ he says. Indeed, before Camusfeàrna, Maxwell had already had a short-lived and ruinous career running a basking-shark fishery. Raised to hunt, but observant enough ...”

“... read bright and blasphemous novels, modern and very moderate poems (which crop up like weeds every day); and an unimpulsive, uninspired, dry desire to go against authority under the name of anti-cant. Margot was a goose, but she was a hissing goose. While her judgments may not always be acute, they are almost always sharp. Of Mary Curzon, for example: ‘The ...”

“... theme-park replication of itself. And when it comes to sheer bad taste the French, on their day, have few equals. It’s not just a matter of fireworks, tightrope-walkers and waiters in Phrygian caps, though we shall have all of these in abundance. Douglas Johnson, in a customarily masterful essay, mentions two rather ...”

“... of the Space Beagle. The presence of Darwinism can then be felt everywhere, from Wyndham’s Day of the Triffids (very clearly a novel about conflict between species) to James Blish’s A Case of Conscience (surely the only novel ever to have been based on a thorough reading of George Gosse’s Omphalos, his totally discredited reconciliation of Darwin ...”

“... the heterosexuality of the implied author of ‘Lessons of the War’.) Later in that lost day we found ourselves in a deplorable bar, where we were set upon by resident puellae. ‘Surely they can tell I’m homosexual,’ he said as if puzzled, though quite how they could be expected to do so was obscure to me, and anyway there were ample other ...”

“... in lines like ‘the muddy Venus of the Firth/lunges through the waterburn’ may owe something to Douglas Dunn (a lingering presence), but which then takes a violent turn characteristic of a good deal of the volume. The protagonist’s diary is filled with the absences of other men: John’s overtime, Jack’s training-course, returning in the tiny hours ...”

“... is to label the Routemaster an ‘icon’, a ‘classic’ that owes its chic to the styling of Douglas Scott, an industrial designer who also refashioned the Aga and the Rediffusion radio. That way, from a niche in the old-codgers’ corner of the heritage industry, the bus turns into an exhibit in the Design Museum. The truth is more edifying, if anyone ...”

“... wrote to Alice, his sister-in-law, and explained why he was at Hunter’s house. ‘I am adding day to day here, as you see – partly because it helps to tide me over a bad – not physically bad – time, and partly because my admirable and more than ever wonderful hostess puts it so as a favour to her that I do, that I ...”

“... taking drugs himself: that his so-called crime was a typical act of generosity. In court that day, as in the courts every day, the judge showed no compassion and no common sense, but coolly proceeded, at enormous public expense, to cause further distress to a family already distressed beyond imagining by judicial ...”

“... reeked of the Forties and Fifities, a monument to the deluded cultural presuppositions of its day. Kate Whitehead, who is now a Radio Four producer – to judge by her book, a shrewd choice of channel – hit upon the Third as a topic for research in institutional history.* Her prose, efficiently trawling the bureaucratic facts, would serve equally well ...”

“... John James, Chris Torrance, Lee Harwood, Andrew Crozier, Peter Riley, J.H. Prynne, Michael Haslam, Douglas Oliver, Barry MacSweeney, Denise Riley – they must nonetheless wonder, from time to time, whether theirs is a case of having missed the boat which would only have been worth catching if they’d been on it in the first place. Perhaps that is why ...”

“... doctrine and a mental grasp of the nature of modern battle on the eve of the First World War. Sir Douglas Haig’s tactical vision was clear but narrow, ‘like that of a man looking at the ground between the ears of a horse’. Haig saw his task as the application of direct fire-power against a visible enemy who would have to be vanquished by cold ...”

“... in on policy points and things like appointments. He would be in my office about seven times a day saying: ‘Minister, I know the ultimate decision is yours, but I would be failing in my duty if I didn’t tell you how unhappy your decision makes me.’ Seven times a day. One person against the vast department.I have ...”

“... The editors of the Field Day Anthology make large claims for its importance as ‘the most comprehensive anthology of Irish writing ever published’. These three volumes, totalling over four thousand pages and spanning a historical period of fifteen hundred years, bring into print an impressive range and variety of writings from a number of languages, periods and genres, and their publication is a major event in Irish studies ...”

“... absent ptyx in ‘Ses purs ongles ...’, adumbrates another mood: He was out for the day when a vanload of pricks arrived at my father’s house to steal his life: the tables and chairs, the knick-knacks and pix, the grandmother clock, all the family things. The dispossession of the father releases the speaker from patriarchal authority, from ...”