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“... fish guts. But rather than a beautiful youth, the earl is a ‘foetal ape’ imprisoned in a cage, who repeatedly rapes his centuries-old housekeeper. After Many a Summer both suffers and benefits from the unresolved tension between the demands of satire and mysticism. The novel reuses the ‘country house’ form that allowed Huxley, in early novels ...”

“... exactly the same thing.’ In 1934, Jennings, a young artist and intellectual about town, joined John Grierson’s GPO Film Unit on a freelance basis, mainly, it seems, because he was hard up. He went on to become Britain’s most admired wartime documentary film-maker, and although his is far from a household name, his critical reputation has for decades ...”

“... had a bad stammer, and his puns were delivered with effort, after a period of voiceless struggle. John Clare described him approaching ‘a joke or a pun with an inward sort of utterance ere he can give it speech till his tongue becomes a sort of Packmans strop turning it over and over till at last it comes out wetted as keen as a razor.’ De Quincey ...”

“... tentatively down over his stomach, then pressed my hand into the hollow beneath his right rib-cage while he breathed deeply in and out. His liver didn’t feel any larger or more tender than when I’d last examined him a couple of weeks earlier. ‘So what do you think?’ he asked, holding my gaze. He had been straining to keep things light, as if we ...”

“... is one of freedom, freedom from ideology (class interests have not yet come down like an iron cage), the freedom of discovery – sexuality, culture, ideas – and in a more subtle sense, perhaps, the freedom from nationality, from the guilt of class and of being an American. What the ‘real’ writer wants to write about is not that kind of ...”

“... Court for Art), 1993-96, annotated with applied subaltern theory, ‘an art standard is a cage for art.’ News that the Guggenheim in New York, the arbiter of the modern, would mount an exhibition to cover five thousand years of Chinese art up to the present was received as a long-awaited vindication. This project, drawing on collections from all ...”

“... an impenetrable accent, he decides to buy ‘a little Filipino servant instead’. There was no cage Waugh would not rattle. Sometimes it was just for fun. He could be, as his former colleague Max Hastings put it, ‘manically mischievous’. At others he would make a point with Swiftian savagery, as in July 1977 when the Gay News trial came to court. Mary ...”

“... supremacy where it belonged, with the ‘richer classes’. In an age which saw Ruskin calling John Stuart Mill a ‘loathsome cretin’ we needn’t be surprised that Harrison was also capable of strong language. When Joseph Chamberlain was said to have hurt his ankle in 1906, Harrison prayed ‘for the sake of our poor dear country’ that the trouble ...”

“... and crash-lands in Trafalgar Square. His encounter with English society as he lies captive in his cage and waits for his wings to grow back is an occasion for Satyanarayana to comment wryly on many things: among them, cultural difference, the nature of scientific progress, and the resources that Indian culture may still possess even though under colonial ...”

“... Clock (2016), Riskin mentions a 16th-century devil carved from wood that appeared to burst from a cage: ‘horrible, twisted, horned, rolling furious eyes, sticking out a blood-red tongue, [it seemed] to throw itself upon the spectator, spitting in his face and letting out great howls.’ Inside was a set of hidden bellows powered by a suspended weight: the ...”

“... Antrim (1901), a collection of slightly fey dialect poems, was much praised by the poet laureate, John Masefield, and set to music by the Irish composers Charles Villiers Stanford and Hamilton Harty. They were Edwardian popular songs of the sort that Bartell D’Arcy might have been asked to sing in ‘The Dead’, when he wasn’t having a go at ‘The Lass ...”

“... like Peter, Juba is an Eldorado: he earns three times more here than he could at home.Outside the John Garang mausoleum, a vast empty lot surrounded by a tall iron fence with gilded spikes, I suddenly find myself swallowed up in a swarming crowd. All along the fence, thousands of people are patiently waiting in line. In the street, among policemen and ...”

“... quality – a little like Weegee’s – at once random and composed. In one, the circus director John Ringling North dominates the right half of the frame, shouting instructions to an unseen person, while above and to the left a high-wire act has two showgirls suspended from the wheels of a bicycle: the picture frame is divided by a balancing bar carried by ...”

“... The yoking of supposedly high and low aspects of life isn’t new, it’s there in Lawrence, and John Cowper Powys finds in it a sort of transgressive holiness, but here it represents no more than a reflex of disgust.Before the ceremony a grieving relative had insisted on the coffin being opened, motivated supposedly by ‘a Huisgenoot article she read last ...”

“... Instead, he closed his poem after eight chapters, consigning his hero and heroine to the gilded cage of 1820s Petersburg and Moscow. Like Stendhal’s characters, the people in Eugene Onegin must fight literature in order to live. As all readers notice, Onegin, Lensky and Tatiana are – like the poem itself – fragile compounds of influences, most of them ...”