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“... for instance, Burns Singer, one of the most original poets of the Fifties, or David Wright and John Heath-Stubbs. All three were friends of Graham, and their inclusion might have helped the Forties and Fifties out of their New Apocalypse v. Movement stand-off. Hamish Henderson, whose 1948 Elegies for the Dead in Cyrenaica (reprinted by Polygon in ...”

“... included Alan Bullock (recipient of a self-righteous Orwell memo), William Empson and John Morris (both of whom wrote elegant memoirs of Orwell at the BBC); he employed Nye Bevan, Richard Acland, J.B.S. Haldane, T.S. Eliot, Quintin Hogg, Bernard Shaw; he led a BBC party, that included Guy Burgess, to a special de-briefing by Stafford Cripps on his ...”

“... its Spenserian echo, was, quite simply, social upheaval. ‘If your life does not please you,’ Wells’s Mr Polly discovered, ‘you can change it.’ But the change, in the peacetime world of Mr Polly, was from social realism to a mode of comic utopian fantasy. Wells also wrote Tono-Bungay, in which the main ...”

“... cleansing, in which some of the men refused to take part. Animals were slaughtered and thrown into wells to poison the water. Homes were burnt down. Prisoners were lined up on the bank of a ditch and shot. I took the book with me to Mogadishu, Somalia, and found that reading a chapter of summary soldiering in My Lai was a busman’s holiday after a day of ...”

“... for instance, had impeccable credentials. Of good Quaker stock and the daughter of the Radical MP John Bright, she campaigned in her twenties for the Reform Bill and women’s enfranchisement; later she joined the Women’s Social and Political Union and was honorary treasurer of the National Union of Women’s Suffrage Societies. Affectionate and caring ...”

“... of Petersburg) and Henry James (Colm Tóibín, The Master), plus recentish likenesses of H.G. Wells, Byron, Woolf, Keats, Tolstoy, Conan Doyle, John Clare and others. Of these it has most in common thematically with The Master – James makes a fleeting appearance, getting Forster’s name wrong – but Galgut doesn’t ...”

“... a heroic Spanish peasant, with a script by Hollywood’s most prominent communist, the playwright John Howard Lawson. Strenuously opposed by groups like the Knights of Columbus and the Legion of Decency, as well as the Vatican, Blockade was the occasion for what Doherty calls ‘the most acrimonious case of doctrinal difference among movie-minded Catholics in ...”

“... forth the optimistic spirit of the revolution’. However, the transposition means that unlike John Gray (with whom he otherwise has much in common), Mishra can follow a straight line from the Counter-Enlightenment, tracing the legacy of Rousseau from the German Romantics, through the European nationalists and anarchists of the 19th century, to their more ...”

“... masters, especially Tallis (1989) and Josquin (1993), and an influential recording of Bach’s St John Passion (1991). For the Bach recordings, Parrott employed no more than two singers on each of the chorus parts and used the same singers for the arias. This was a response to traditional choral society performances, which tended to deploy a full ...”

“... Barker Centre with its statue of Winged Time. I had taken the same picture under the bust of John Harvard as I had on my last visit. I had seen William James’s house, had imagined Elif Batuman scampering around campus, gathering material for The Idiot. I had refused, out of pure perversion, to see the Glass Flowers, had gone to visit the Chinese jades ...”

“... of al-Qaida before 11 September 2001. All of this echoed other wrongful detentions, like that of John Walker in 1974, when the West Midlands police coerced an innocent Irishman into confessing that he was an IRA ‘brigadier’, ignorant of the fact that such a title existed only in the British army. This confession was nevertheless swallowed whole. Walker ...”

“... what attitudes to adopt. The influence of an earlier generation of ill-disposed critics, like H.G. Wells and Lytton Strachey, remained much stronger than it should have done. There were reminiscences and three-decker hagiographies, but the archives were either unavailable or unexplored. There was Elie Halévy’s massive History of the English People in the ...”

“... Was Hugh MacDiarmid a great poet? Was he, as John MacQueen asserts in his Foreword to Catherine Kerrigan’s study, one of ‘the three greatest poets to use English in the 20th century’, the other two being Yeats and Eliot? One can understand MacQueen putting the matter that way, but perhaps it is not the most helpful way when the reputations of Eliot and Yeats are shaking down, in the ordinary process of time, following their immense acclaim ...”

“... that British new music – equally suspicious of European modernism and anything American, whether John Cage or Janis Joplin – wasn’t a club worth joining. Although he had no desire to take up 12-tone composition techniques, Arnold Schoenberg’s music appealed to him intellectually and he engaged with it seriously – in noticeable contrast to Vaughan ...”

“... from ‘Fenians out of jail’, some of whom, like the Irish-American poet John Boyle O’Reilly, were now eminently respectable figures: but ‘They only fawned for dollars on the blood-dyed Clan-na-Gael’ was a just, if unkind comment on the Parnellite use of Irish-American revolutionary organisations for fund-raising. It might be ...”