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“... cartoonists all know that desert island = sexually restricted environment, hence the mound of sand, palm tree, curvy lady, unshaven man etc ... In his rewrite, Dryden responded strongly to the idea of a woman who had never seen a marriageable man, inventing, to match her, a man who had never seen a woman (not noticing that in Shakespeare’s play there is ...”

“... from, and distinctly harder than, that taken in its dying days by the Reagan Administration. George Shultz travelled to the Middle East this summer to spread the word that ‘the continued occupation of the West Bank and Gaza and the frustration of Palestinian rights is a dead-end street. The belief that this can continue is an illusion.’ It is a ...”

“... it had been even worse: fifty for every German). Kappler – played by Richard Burton in George P. Cosmatos’s film Massacre in Rome (1973) – had to come up with names very quickly: the killings were to be carried out within 24 hours of the attack. In the film we see Burton at a desk, adding the names of political prisoners, men already condemned ...”

“... he is ‘finical, awkward’, concerned only with minutiae, with the ‘dragging grains’ of sand he is condemned to spend his life investigating. Bishop, one suspects, knew rather more about real birds than Shelley did; like Marianne Moore, she prided herself on her ability to capture the feel of different species through accurate ...”

“... the bank was a very profitable business, though it sometimes placed them in awkward positions: George Washington, for example, was a stockholder when the bank was financing the war to put down his rebellion. For the state, having easy access to a huge pool of private capital allowed it to outspend and ultimately defeat France, even though it was larger and ...”

“... rendering of Chinese when I was young to László Krasznahorkai, more recently, in the versions of George Szirtes and Ottilie Mulzet, which read enthrallingly in English, though needless to say I have no way of knowing what the originals are like. Many celebrated translators, like Gansel, carry on adding to their linguistic crane bag: Michael Henry Heim, who ...”

“... in the cells. A major disappearance is the railway bridge that once carried, along with promos for George Davis and Reggie Kray, passengers from Dalston Junction to Broad Street: a lovely aerial view of industry, canal, domestic and commercial property, Shoreditch to City. You saw, precisely, where you were. For a token fee (often no fee), you became a ...”

“... wind-honed archipelago. Many of them are inhabited. The islands are whale-shapes, as their poet George Mackay Brown noted. Few trees impede the wind. Water, salt and fresh, in wide bays or lochs or channels, is always to hand, lightening and softening the land it encircles. The land is fertile, the people prosperous, Norse, liberal, and they live in two ...”

“... of Being Earnest was to open on 14 February. Wilde attended rehearsals, and was persuaded by George Alexander, the actor-manager, who was producing the play and performing in it, to drop the act in which Algernon is almost arrested for debt. This play, too, was a huge success, with both critics and audiences. ‘Oscar Wilde,’ the New York Times ...”

“... to Brooklyn, its far end; the abomination of desolation, the houses thinned to nothing, the blank sand, the shattered cabaret with the sign, ‘The Girl You Bring is the Girl You Take Home’, the new cabaret in the middle of waste silence, with ambitious men aligning the brilliant trims; the shades along the last street and at its head a small young brick ...”

“... which precipitated perhaps the most dangerous financial crisis in the history of the republic (as George W. Bush said of his country’s economy at the time, ‘This sucker could go down’). The memoirs of Bush’s secretary of the Treasury, Hank Paulson, make clear his utter terror at what the forthcoming election might do to his rescue plans if either ...”

“... of that Surrey speciality, the gated High Class Suburb (as Nairn, no ironist, called them): St George’s Hill, Wentworth, Camilla Lacey and so on. They would come in time to be valued by persons greedy for plastic columns: white collar criminals, oligarchs’ security apes, footballers, light entertainers and seedy golf pros – the improbable successors ...”

“... envied and wrestled with as an equal artist. Eliot and Yeats, her early delights. Anne Sexton and George Starbuck, with a few ‘immortal’ love poems between them. ‘Skunk Hour’ (Lowell’s response to Bishop’s ‘The Armadillo’) is instrumental, since it includes the poet as part of a blasted landscape: the hell of its heaven and earth, or the ...”

“... was that Brooke was not allowed to eat meat in his childhood (Ninny asserted it ‘caused sand in his water’), a curtailment which, when he first went to school, nearly resulted in death from starvation, as nothing was added to his plate of routine vegetables, a component of the menu at its lowest ebb in school fare during the first war. Thought of ...”

“... poem is in Worcester College, Oxford, and though it cannot definitely be proved to be by Marvell, George Clark, the early editor who discovered it, believed it was. In the poem, Marvell says:                                ’Tis always late To struggle with inevitable fate. Much rather though, I know, expect’st to tell How ...”