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“... makes me wish I were writing about the work of Fulke Greville or Sir Walter Ralegh or Sir Thomas Wyatt. I studied English and History. In English we were told almost immediately by Seamus Deane that we must bring nothing of ourselves, of our personal experience to a poem when we read. A poem was a verbal structure, and our job was to define the nature ...”

“... England,’ he said, ‘justice is open to all, like the Ritz.’ The Early Victorian poet Thomas Love Peacock had noted the unequal impact of the Sunday observance laws: The poor man’s sins are glaring; In the face of ghostly warning He is caught in the fact Of an overt act – Buying greens on a Sunday morning. The rich man is invisible In the ...”

“... however, Garrow is an object of contempt. He rates over ten times as many index entries as Thomas Erskine, a more important figure, because he is the exemplar for a thesis which rings through the book like the 13th chime of the clock – that where the old form of English trial was a truth-seeking process, albeit an inefficient one, the modern ...”

“... and arresting the servants; ‘chief extremity’ was used on his younger brother and confidant, Thomas Kelley. The house was put under guard, and Kelley’s laboratory sealed up. All the ‘elixirs’ in it were impounded; also certain ‘boards’, perhaps wall-panels, painted with arcane hieroglyphs. Learning of Kelley’s escape, the Emperor ‘cursed in ...”

“... things to come’ is revised to ‘dreaming’. Ackroyd’s second book of poetry, with its Duncan Grant cover, signalled a homecoming. Title? London Lickpenny. Already, in 1973, the poet was rehearsing pinball-arcade extracts that would resurface, nine years later, in his first novel, The Great Fire of London. The brief flirtation with the obscurantism of the ...”

“... it’s situated in the heart of the conservation area, we were able to do by means of a government grant. Stage 2 was to empty the apartments. Happily many of the tenants were elderly so we could leave this largely to a process of natural wastage. When the overall population of the building had come down to a manageable number, Stage 3 involved locating this ...”

“... her first in any language.The most eloquent invocation of the seedy set-up was made by the poet Thomas Hood, who used Crachami’s exhibition to illustrate the price of fame, or of visibility, even in a person who was hardly visible to begin with. (Hood may have had in mind a sketch by John Augustus Atkinson which shows a man standing in the doorway of a ...”

“... They think of themselves as continuing the struggle against mystificatory nonsense that Thomas Huxley waged against Bishop Wilberforce, Russell against Bergson, and Carnap against Heidegger. These philosophers still award a special ontological status (‘fundamental reality’) to the elementary particles discovered by the physicists. They believe ...”

“... by the wayside to dip into it.’ My great-grandfather soon discovered Oliver Goldsmith and Thomas De Quincey. ‘The beauty of the prose poems and neatness of the humour was such as I had never before met with.’ The practical mysteries of propagation and grafting now cohabited with another less focused compulsion, the urge to write. The village boy ...”

“... numbers, Origen, the Great War, puns, madrigals, nail-making, Nye Bevan, biplanes, God, Thomas Bradwardine, Platonism, Messiaen, hawthorns, forgotten martyrs, Iceland, the Virgin, Welsh history, laurels, prophecy, cabalism). The instant sources of delight are lines that reverberate in the mind (‘A solitary axe-blow that is the echo of a lost ...”

“... they expected to fight them in Texas as well. They probably didn’t realise, however, that their grant from the Mexican government had placed them deep in Comanchería, the area of the South-West controlled by the Comanches, or that the Mexicans intended to use the rapidly growing colonies of English-speaking settlers from the US (known as Anglos) to create ...”

“... Poetry Center in order to establish a reading series (a recent phenomenon popularised by Dylan Thomas) and archive. Auden stayed with Ruth Witt-Diamant, the Poetry Center’s founding director, and, in return for his considerable largesse, asked only that he be delivered to gay bars where he might meet young Jewish American males with blond hair. Thom Gunn ...”

“... that would make Joseph Goebbels proud’. Eurozone finance ministers found Varoufakis hard work. Thomas Wieser, the former head of the Eurogroup Working Group, an advisory body to Eurozone finance ministers, recently told a Swiss newspaper that during meetings Varoufakis kept up long monologues, delaying real negotiations in the hope that a last-minute panic ...”

“... of the worst thing you could do’. And here is Hardwick at the public library discovering Thomas Mann, whose Death in Venice has been mis-shelved in the murder mystery section. (A lesser woman would have put it back.) In 1934, she went to the University of Kentucky, where she sought out ‘the literary people and the political people’. ‘I have a ...”

“... East Coast filmmakers hurried West to seek maximum sunlight and maximum separation from Thomas Edison’s Motion Picture Patents Company, which demanded copyright payment or else a bullet in the expensive newfangled movie cameras. The canyons and ravines of the Hollywood Hills were the natural redoubts against the Patents Company ...”