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“... rich. She distinguishes the condition of those unfortunates for whom the world is a melancholy cage of privilege in which their every whim can be immediately satisfied from that of ordinary grafting millionaires and multi-millionaires. There is an unbridgeable chasm between Haves and Have-Yachts. And bigger yachts. And yachts with helipads and ...”

“... he would have been disappointed. There was some half-hearted praise from Movement types, but when John Carey, for example, needed an honourable popular writer to batter the highbrows with in The Intellectuals and the Masses (1992), he turned to Arnold Bennett. Morgan’s biography had a memorable centrepiece: a description of the senile Maugham crapping on ...”

“... forget. She has been stoned in Khomeini’s brickyard but she does not forget. She has hung in a cage at Cumae wasting away but she does not forget. She has burned in Israeli phosphorus for hours but she does not forget. She has crackled in the marketplace at Rouen but she does not forget. She has been injected with kerosene in Belsen but she does not ...”

“... work of an obscure photographer she had discovered in Paris (Atget), Ralph Steiner, Paul Grotz, John Cheever, Ben Shahn and, most important of all, Lincoln Kirstein.Evans always acknowledged the role luck played in his life, and nothing could have been luckier than the friendship he formed with Kirstein, whose influence on his career was so profound that ...”

“... would be seen through its ogival windows. What bells had not been evacuated from St Catherine, St John, St Brigit, Saints Barbara, Elizabeth, Peter and Paul, from Trinity to Corpus Christi, melted in their belfries and dripped away without pomp or ceremony. In the Big Mill red wheat was milled. Butcher Street smelled of burnt Sunday roast. The Municipal ...”

“... Barbara Bray takes a feelingful turn, starting with a letter of condolence written in March 1958. John Bray, Barbara’s estranged husband, the father of her two small girls, has died, and Beckett, unusually for his letters by now, brings his full rhetorical resources to bear on the task in hand: All I could say, and much more, and much better, you will have ...”

“... or rather J.J. Beegan did. When I turned to the Irish census records I could quite easily find John Beegan, who was born in 1868, the eldest child of John and Jane Beegan. In 1901 they were living together with the younger Beegans, Mary and Thomas, at 23 Dunlo Hill in Ballinasloe. On the census form, ...”

“... by the Teflon-coated fabric of the Dome, was once the Execution Dock. The gallows and iron cage moved here from Wapping, when the sensibilities of that district, much closer to civilisation, were elevated by the mansions of marine speculators and the better class of sea captain. Executions and bloated bodies washed over by three tides were less of a ...”

“... after the last four years’; ‘Heavens, what a vale of tears it is’; ‘Oh heavens, now John Ashbery and I have to go and have an “intimate” lunch with Ivar Ivask.’) In 1973 she wrote to James Merrill: ‘I could weep myself to think of Mr [Chester] Kallman’s weeping over “The Moose”.’ There is no explanation as to how she learned that ...”

“... is over.’ Peter Fonda: ‘We should rip Barron Trump from his mother’s arms and put him in a cage with paedophiles.’ Advisers to the president and members of his cabinet have been mobbed and jeered, denied service in restaurants, and harassed at home; and more such actions have been urged by the woke contingent of the Democratic Party. Representative ...”

“... brute! What’s the use – he’ll be right in again?’ His most famous example, in a letter to John Bartlett, is full of provocations: The best place to get the abstract sound of sense is from voices behind a door that cuts off the words. Ask yourself how these sentences would sound without the words in which they are embodied: You mean to tell me you ...”

“... Wilkin, who printed almost all of her works; and the one-time Oxford philosopher and theologian John Norris, who encouraged her thinking and who in 1695 published their Letters Concerning the Love of God, thus saving Astell’s letters to him from the abyss into which much of her correspondence fell. Her opening letter, written on 21 September 1693 when she ...”

“... unoccupied for more than two minutes they would inevitably bugger each other. I share with Sir John Betjeman the fate of having been educated at a public school so steeped in the Arnold tradition that, when we were there, water closets were doorless: but perhaps the Laureate was exaggerating when, later in life, he said that he did not have a bowel ...”

“... childhood onwards, Tagore had been looking out of windows and partitions; the word khancha, or ‘cage’, recurs in the songs and poems, and there is a concern with the possibilities and avenues of egress which is common in victims of a disciplinary society. When Tagore published his first book of songs at the age of 16, he was praised by the foremost writer ...”

“... affair than it actually is. It is striking that authoritative Rousselians such as Ford or John Ashbery, one of Roussel’s earliest and still most unflagging supporters, seem to describe his work with a beguiling sense of calmness and equanimity, in a tone a bit like that of a pathologist describing a wound to a colleague. In a wonderfully ...”