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“... causing turmoil; and for the author to turn on a chill by technique does not even pretend to alter the characters. The process of bargaining is often felt as a chill. Our sympathies have been so much aroused that any theory allowing the events of the day to do them some kind of good comes as a relief, in keeping with the book’s realistic good-humoured ...”

“... 1960s, the comic-book landscape was being altered by the ‘underground comix’ movement, led by Robert Crumb. Among Crumb’s most popular creations are the suave adventurer Fritz the Cat (whose conquests include a female ostrich and his own sister) and Mr Natural, a fountainhead of exasperatingly vague advice, outfitted in a Tolstoyan beard and ...”

“... equally inevitable.’ If their work seems to us now a record of their failure to understand or alter the conditions of their age, ‘we need to ask in what degree it is our failure rather than theirs.’ Kermode’s theme is the virtue of transgression – virtue in its double sense of merit and power. He begins with a forgotten Thirties novel that he ...”

“... direction, or, perhaps, on issues remote from the reading public’s own experience: they cannot alter strongly-held opinions formed in work-places, pubs, homes and in such places as the City. (The British pub is arguably more influential than the press in forming opinion on domestic policies.) Even the heavily-controlled press of Communist or other ...”

“... so without risk. The same is true of the Americans and the Communist system. But that does not alter the fact that neither side planned to attack the other. The basic perception which initiated the Cold War was, as Halle and his epigones used to point out, quite false. Gaddis does not answer one question which has always interested me. Was it the ...”

“... transport for the inspection teams – and it was never the intention that CIA intelligence should alter the course of the inspections themselves. Inspections in Iraq were initially supposed to operate in the same way, with Security Council resolutions and Iraqi declarations setting the parameters for on-site inspections. But incomplete data submissions and ...”

“... software, but for decades this enormous investment seemed to pay no dividends. As the economist Robert Solow put it in 1987, ‘You can see the computer age everywhere but in the productivity statistics.’ Perhaps too much time was wasted in training employees to use computers; perhaps the sorts of activity that computers make more efficient, like word ...”

“... attention in individualised verse forms. Supernatural power, the ability to shapeshift, alter fates, change the weather, comes to be associated with the inventiveness of song, with rapidly metamorphosing rhymes (‘perish’, ‘cherish’, ‘vanquish’, ‘anguish’) and dancing, careless rhythms: ‘This wreck of a realm – this deed of my ...”

“... the best in the country, and education – including that offered at a nautical school run by Robert Burns’s friend David Sillar – was counted high. There was suddenly a book shop, Templeton’s in the High Street, and newspapers from London, along with the hot political and literary journals of the day. In a flash, Irvine became a town that was part ...”

“... This sort of anthology is just the right place to happen on Hardy’s ‘The Garden Seat’, Robert Frost’s marvellous little short tale in verse about the buzz saw, a sonnet of Dante admirably translated by Kenneth Koch, Adrian Mitchell’s ‘Giving Potatoes’, Theodore Roethke’s ‘The Meadow Mouse’ or a 12-line poem by James Stephens (author ...”

“... Well, I could never write a verse, ­– could you?Let’s to the Prado and make the most of time.Robert Browning, ‘How It Strikes a Contemporary’The world has an established place for poems about paintings – sometimes you wonder if there was ever a poet who didn’t write one – but, oddly, the poem-painting relationship doesn’t seem to be reversible ...”

“... Moore and Claude Cahun (1920). Thomson’s sharp sketches of the women’s intimates, such as Robert Desnos, Edouard de Max and Henri Michaux, are more successful than the cameo appearances or conversational allusions. Names like Hemingway or Lacan can’t be brought into play without making a thud or a clang. No doubt people at Paris parties in the 1920s ...”

“... screens of trees, it feels provisional and volatile, as if its entire character might drastically alter with the next shift in the political or economic wind.For an English-born reader, America is written in a language deceptively similar to one’s own and full of pitfalls and ‘false friends’. The word nature, for instance, means something different here ...”

“... consequences of large families for poor households. In lines borrowed from the social campaigner Robert Dale Owen, she asked: ‘Is it desirable then, is it moral, for parents to increase their families regardless of the consequences to themselves or the wellbeing to their offspring when a simple, easy, healthy and CERTAIN remedy is within our control?’By ...”