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“... and might even serve as a bastion against Japanese expansion into Manchuria – two birds with one stone. For Hoberman the whole doomed experiment, a utopian scheme for modernisation and kolkhozisation of the luftmensh, was just another exemplary twist on Jewish Luck, the title of a strange Yiddish-language Soviet film of the Twenties, which shows the pathetic ...”

“... straight writer to have a gay hero is still highly unusual. A fascinating essay in this context is Norman Mailer’s ‘The Homosexual as Villain’, commissioned by the gay magazine ONE in the 1950s. He’s pretty unsparing of his own past novelistic practice, saying that when he thought homosexuality was evil it made sense to dole it out to negative ...”

“... herself employed in speaking with Virginia Moore and Ellmann,’ Saddlemyer writes. In 1961, when Norman Jeffares was writing his introduction to Yeats’s Selected Poems, she wrote to him: ‘I dislike your use of the word “Fake” . . . I told you this before & you had a happier phrasing in your book. However, I cannot ask you to alter this. The word ...”

“... Globus, then the heads of Cannon Films, to make a film version of King Lear, with a script (!) by Norman Mailer, in which Mailer and his daughter would star as Lear and Cordelia. After half a day’s shooting, Mailer and his daughter walked off the set and Godard tore up the script, beginning again with Burgess Meredith and Molly Ringwald. Woody Allen did a ...”

“... that season please him: ‘Also finally finished Mr Williams’s dame-and-dago drivel about Mrs Stone. It is, well, pathetic.’ A month later, he was not pleased by Stephen Spender’s World within World: ‘What a spurious book – him and his homosexual affairs that were only “undertaken in a spirit of opportunism”. I’ll say. Seriously though, it ...”

“... Camouflage, ships painted in the disruptive ‘dazzle’ schemes developed by the British artist Norman Wilkinson were said to resemble ‘Cubist paintings on a colossal scale’. Yet the First World War was not merely history’s way of confirming Picasso’s genius, and the emergence of strategic camouflage didn’t represent a simple triumph of ...”

“... with the San Francisco Review in 1962. Davidson quotes two lines from ‘Blood from the Stone’, the first poem Oppen wrote after the dream, and the tenth of some forty in the new book, most of them bigger, all of them less cagey, than anything in Discrete Series: Everything I am is Us. Come home. In Davidson’s gloss, ‘the early 1960s in ...”

“... a few years earlier, T.S. Eliot had written his thesis on F.H. Bradley). ‘Time’s face is not stone nor still his wings,’ he concluded. ‘Our mind, being dead, wishes to have time die/For we, being ghosts, cannot catch hold of things.’ MacNeice’s early poetry plays defensive games with time (too much frequency is stasis and so on), but he was right ...”

“... planting schemes and restored municipal beds. Unnoticed, rough sleepers in thin bags utilise the stone terrace of the park café that has been shut for years. Late risers, having nothing much to rise for, burrow deep into dismal kapok-stuffed cocoons, while dog-accompanists use ballistic/prosthetic devices to hurl soggy yellow-green tennis balls for their ...”

“... where, without conquering the proud hearts, or gaining the warm affections of the Irish, the Anglo-Norman barons, who, with mailed hearts as well as backs – neither civilising nor enriching the country – resided amongst us.’It is clear that Wilde is aware of the difficulties inherent in any effort to describe the Irish landscape with political ...”

“... on a sober calculation, an immediate one million homes. For these there was insufficient brick, stone, timber, and insufficient money – certainly not enough to shift materials from where they were to where they weren’t. The book therefore explores in detail every form of rammed earth building – which is to say, building from whatever ground is ...”

“... the PLO. And in the wake of the Six-Day War in 1967, the American Jewish community underwent what Norman Podhoretz called a ‘complete Zionisation’. As Joshua Leifer argues in his new book, Tablets Shattered, the Jewish establishment became increasingly ‘particularist, their rhetoric blunter in its defence of Jewish self-interest’. That establishment ...”

“... it, the English dotards and their epigones would, amazingly, still be at it, all red brick and stone quoins, in the years after the second war. ‘Retardataire’ was a word Pevsner relished.Reilly’s galère left out a number of artists of whose existence he may have been unaware, just as they may have been unaware of each other. Patrick Abercrombie ...”

“... Shibboleth upon our tongue; By which with easy search you may distinguish Your Roman-Saxon-Danish-Norman English. His attack on English insularity, xenophobia and ‘absurd pride in purity of descent’ was part of a larger scheme to make the English see not only that their national affairs were tied to those of Europe but that they were ‘connected to the ...”

“... not where it should be,’ he kept saying. We eventually found the church, which had a Norman nave and was therefore unlikely to have moved since the Ordnance Survey landed its symbol on the Landranger map.Thinking back on this, I wonder whether my father was already in the early stages of dementia. He was only in his mid-fifties, and it was a ...”