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“... pawky Kelman device: he’s subverting our assumption that manual workers don’t read theoretical texts. Of course the man’s mates take the piss. Jake, who ‘has an inquisitive mind’, asks him what the book’s about. After hearing a sample, he remarks, ‘You read this stuff a lot dont ye?’ and the ...”

“... Americans, ignored by whites’?Her book appeared in the US just as Covid began to take hold. Donald Trump blamed China, the Chinese, and Asians in general; many of us who look ‘Chinese’ began to fear reprisals more than getting sick. Shopowners in New York’s Chinatown reported a 70 per cent drop in business even before Trump started talking about ...”

“... voices. In ‘January’, one asks: ‘Mommy what’s this fork doing?/What?/It’s being Donald Duck.’ Domestic conversation blends into a kind of surrealism whose hectic music mimics the rhythms of family life. Voices interweave. ‘Edmund. Edmund. Edmund. Maaah. Lodle lodle lodle.’ Many of the poems reflect on the ‘radical bodily change’ of ...”

“... from a 1940 review of Max Miller at the Holborn Empire, attached as a footnote to ‘The Art of Donald McGill’. The same four-volume collection contains 20 pieces Orwell contributed to newspapers, anthologies and magazines while on the BBC staff, but includes nothing he wrote as a producer except for a couple of letters and memoranda. ‘I am tendering my ...”

“... are holding 155. They cannot lie down. They are pressured to sign documents in English they cannot read. The one source of running water in the cell is the single open toilet, where one defecates in the crowd.*The head of an anti-immigrant group, the Federation for American Immigration Reform, says the administration ‘doesn’t want the detention experience ...”

“... The title sounds like a novel, and the book can and should be read like one – a very remarkable one. Philip Larkin, who had the knack of making sideways critical comments as memorable as those in his verse, remarked that ‘the first thing a novelist must provide is a separate world,’ and it is true that the world Dr Green has made out of the relationship of Mark Pattison and Meta Bradley is not exactly a separate world ...”

“... without polemical side-glances, he can be perfectly lucid and explicit, indeed a pure joy to read. When he takes a stand on current controversies, he tends to be cryptic and elliptic, briefly marshalling a series of arguments which are rarely elaborated to the extent that would have been necessary to make them persuasive. Moreover, he never engages in ...”

“... that. And perhaps this isn’t the sort of thing it’s worth worrying about in a thriller; I once read a novel by Robert Ludlum in which the hero gives his London cab driver a £100 note. Anyway, ‘a group of pro-Ukraine, anti-Russia separatists assaulted a ranch in northern Algeria where Suliman Cindoruk was believed to be hiding’ – huh? just roll with ...”

“... a bit like an Americanised nouveau roman and puts Baker somewhere on a line of descent between Donald Barthelme, with whom he briefly studied, and David Foster Wallace. Yet Howie isn’t void-struck or an object of satire. Like Mike, the narrator of Baker’s second novel, Room Temperature (1990), he just wants to get things ‘correctly situated in the ...”

“... by the subsequent debates and committees into a subtly but crucially different shape. Now it read that ‘Congress shall make no law respecting an establishment of religion, or prohibiting the free exercise thereof; or abridging the freedom of speech, or of the press’ (my italics). Thus, in the context of a recently successful rebellion against the ...”

“... That, you might say, is perfectly lucid, but you might say that only after you have read the sentence twice. I take it to mean that as long as no one has laid down rules for arranging things, you are free to arrange them as you see fit. Following this ‘museum’ principle, Spufford sets out his representative texts in accordance with a ...”

“... and Melodious Guile, to my mind the best of his critical books, takes its place – along with Donald Davie’s Articulate Energy and Winifred Nowottny’s The Language Poets Use – among the very few enjoyable and enriching studies of how poetry works. Where Davie discusses syntax and Nowottny diction, Hollander bats the bounding breeze on poets’ ploys ...”

“... till ready,2 has recently appeared and its excellence shamed me into tracking down Vol. One. 2. Donald Davie, from his memoirs, just published under the title These the Companions.3 And 3. Lord Longford, from his Diary of a Year4 – the year 1981. Each of these books makes much of its own modesty, of its willingness to expose its author’s true and warty ...”

“... collection of Britten’s letters and diaries, entitled Letters from a Life and edited by Donald Mitchell and Philip Reed, appeared in 1991, and its first volume covers the same period as this new collection; but there was plenty of work for the new editor, John Evans. The diaries were begun when Britten was 15 and ended, rather abruptly, when he was ...”

“... charge sheet could contain tens of thousands of crimes; rooms full of documents will need to be read; a multitude of victims and witnesses will wish to testify. Mounting a rigorous defence will be time-consuming. Yet there must be a rigorous defence. By providing due process to those accused of the most heinous crimes, societies demonstrate their adherence ...”