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“... that ‘in the early chapters of their autobiographies, Coleridge, Hardy, Yeats, Sassoon, Graves, Day Lewis, Spender and MacNeice have a good deal to say about the external circumstances of their family lives, but little about their internal or “writerly” lives.’ That is true, though some of these poets have left us evidence of their methods of ...”

“... Odyssey with its European and African ordeals, the poem’s concluding books return to present-day St Lucia. The narrator, relieved of his ‘wrong love’ for the mysterious Greek woman, dismantles his Homeric metaphor and releases his characters:    There, in her head of ebony, there was no real need for the historian’s remorse, nor for ...”

“... and the manic-depressive psychology of speculative investment, were there from the first day. We know that cast all too well. It didn’t take the Northern Rock affair to show that sober gents with much to lose can take leave of their senses. That was already plain by the 1690s. Douglas Watt’s ...”

“... restaurateurs, gamblers and other essential personnel ready to set up the whole town in a day at the current furthest extent of the railroad. Whereupon life, death, drinking, whoring, gambling, fighting and doubtless a little quiet poetic contemplation went on until the railroad tracks had been laid beyond a certain outer limit, when the whole kit and ...”

“... it discusses and how it relates to subsequent cultural history. The papers came out the next day all more or less saying the same thing: ‘Mucky Play for Bradford’.17 May. Sitting outside a café in Regent’s Park Road, A. and I see a transvestite striding up the street with a mane of henna’d hair, short skirt and long skinny legs. It’s the legs ...”

“... Do you forget things? I do, more and more. My ailing, failing memory was sorely tested the other day. ‘Do you remember who won the Grand National?’ I was asked. Of course I did. It was the most exciting race for years, won right at the post by ... Then came the blank. I’d sat and watched the race, goddam it, but the winner still eluded me, just as it had at the time ...”

“... in the early 1960s, seems strangely vieux jeu today. No one cares. Yet it was effective in its day. Harold Macmillan had an ear for the rhetoric of opposition. He and Sir Harold Wilson have always been on cordial terms. They are, seen in relation to one aspect of politics, birds of a feather. They have something of the same capacity for wit, style and ...”

“... is that enchanting mistress Ugliness. With her I will live and what a riot we shall have. Not a day shall pass without a fresh horror. Prometheus leaves his rock to cohabit with the Furies. Jack Yeats’s judgments are better-worded than most attacks on the innovative experiments of early Modernist poetry, but they make the same charges that would be ...”

“... in the middle. Then there’s the ‘cameo life-story pendant’, the Memphis newspapers from the day of Presley’s death, and so on, and on – the list is not endless, but it does fill 14 pages. Elvisly Yours additionally tries to keep its readers abreast of whatever Elvis News there can possibly be, four years after his death. For the British ...”

“... historically. Certainly, if this book really is, as its blurb claims, ‘set to influence present-day arguments about devolution, unionism and nationalism in Britain and Ireland’, it isn’t at all obvious in which direction it hopes its influence will tend. I doubt that many politicians or constitutional theorists will get as far as the end of its unwieldy ...”

“... the world of a dangerous queen. In the mythography of Cleopatra, from Antiquity to the present day, the snake is not just the means of her death. It is also her defining feature, her emblem. If you want to understand Cleopatra, her power and her danger, you must first understand her snake. Paintings and visual images show the emblematic quality of ...”

“... Fergusson’ want to discuss Fergusson’s ‘Elegy, on the Death of Scots Music’. Douglas Dunn tells us that ‘spirited elegy, of a kind that trades more on celebration than mourning, is characteristic of the male Scottish mind.’ It takes a while to recover from the massiveness of that statement, and its inappropriateness to, say, Robin ...”

“... they made for Barbie some forty years ago. Similar revelations here would be illegal under Douglas Hurd’s new Secrets Bill. But then, of course, we are a decent nation; we don’t do things like that.16 April. The 98 Liverpool fans crushed to death at Sheffield bring back memories of a similar disaster at Bolton in 1946. We never took a Sunday paper ...”

“... journalism. They were sociable men, fraternising widely and vigorously with the élite of the day. But no one was on a footing of unreserved friendship with either of them; both had enemies and detractors even among their close acquaintance. Some of this helps to explain why Lewes and Forster have been jointly neglected. From the biographer’s point of ...”

“... aspirations, and with certain stormy evenings at the Abbey Theatre, made her famous in her day, but it seems that her day has passed. The twenty-odd volumes of her works – dramas, folklore collections, journals – are not often disturbed. She wrote 27 plays as well as four adaptations of Molière, but I gather it ...”