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“... finding it ‘simple and unimposing’, as Kissinger noted, and with a ping-pong table in the hall. Then they encountered Mao himself: shuffling, speaking with difficulty, supported by one of his ‘pretty young assistants’. The meeting with Mao may have represented a momentous ‘earthquake in the Cold War landscape’ as MacMillan claims, but it was ...”

“... she would tell the Paris Review several decades later – the interviewer was the poet Donald Hall. Her teachers for the most part had more old-fashioned tastes; and the writers they admired tended not to be the same as those – Browning, Yeats, James – she would pick out. She had no time for Edwardian sentiment and shied away from the prevailing ...”

“... verse translation of Homer before 1598 would have made Homer, or anyone with an ear, groan. Arthur Hall, from Grantham in Lincolnshire, had trundled out ten books of the Iliad in flat, heavy fourteeners in 1581. Hall did not work from the Greek, or even from the Latin, but from Hugues Salel’s French translation, which was ...”

“... by the conspiracist Glenn Beck and a former ‘special guest’ on Duck Dynasty, fired up the hall when he suddenly stopped reading the teleprompter to ‘speak from the heart’: ‘To the next generation, your war is here, you don’t have to go searching for it. Your people are afraid … Who among you will love something more than you love ...”

“... through earpieces. At the end of her talk it was a pleasure to take mine out. Others around the hall were doing the same, stretching and chatting and moving from their seats. I did not sense the general atmosphere of mutinous disapprobation that would have been fitting. There was to be a short break followed by smaller sessions in other rooms on specific ...”

“... is this ensemble, stretching across a millennium and round thousands of miles of coastline, that Richard Fletcher has taken as his subject in The Conversion of Europe. What concerns him is not the conversion of this or that people but all medieval conversions (including conversions between Christianity and its two rival monotheisms, Judaism and Islam, which ...”

“... Jeremy Prynne what he thought of Captain Beefheart, he said he thought he sounded like Little Richard.’ Poodle Play is the Cambridge Poetry Festival on steroids. The exoskeleton recalls the papers delivered from the platform on that Saturday afternoon in King’s: selections from the Frankfurt School, carried aloft like placards in a Brecht play, moral ...”

“... cantata has a similar power. No one could sit, as I did earlier this year, in the Royal Festival Hall during a performance by the Philharmonia and London Symphony Chorus under Richard Hickox and not be shattered into submission. Belshazzar’s Feast takes Elgarian oratorio by its neck and flings it into the 20th ...”

“... with acuity on Madison and Jefferson and on Jack Ruby (the assassin of Kennedy’s assassin) and Richard Nixon. He is the closest thing the New World has to a Chesterton or a Burke. Who better to reflect on the relationship of sin and power, of eros and daring, of charisma and catastrophe, than an American pilgrim whose journey has taken him from William ...”

“... extinction. Back in 1975, Spens replaced Peter Townsend as editor of Studio International with Richard Cork. Townsend went on to found Art Monthly in 1976 with Jack and Nell Wendler. Under Townsend, James Faure-Walker had been a contributor to Studio International. Cork made his copy less welcome and Faure-Walker and others set up Artscribe. Eventually ...”

“... do.’ Apprehensive about ‘top-hatty philanthropy’, Ashbee went to the East End, to Toynbee Hall. ‘There are some splendid men here,’ he wrote in 1886, ‘and a great deal of unostentatious heroism.’ It was here that plans for putting Ruskin into practice took shape: a school and workshop where the teachers would work in the shop and recruit the ...”

“... first. On 4 February 1658, seven months before his death, he arrived unannounced at Westminster Hall in a hackney carriage – the Thames was icebound – and told his startled son-in-law, Charles Fleetwood, that he intended to dissolve Parliament. Think hard about it first, Fleetwood pleaded, for it is a decision of great consequence. ‘You are a ...”

“... is to weave through place and time with a guide as robust and detailed in his knowledge as, say, Richard Cobb is about France, albeit with diametrically opposite political analysis and enthusiasms. As a pamphleteer and radical, Davis is still very much on active service, though, as he remarked not so long ago, the programme of a radical in Los Angeles today ...”

“... Russia, coming two years after The Berlin Wall Café contains 48 poems; Peter Redgrove’s In the Hall of the Saurians, one year after its predecessor, has 34; Norman MacCaig’s Voice-over, three years on from his Collected Poems, has 58; Cat’s Whisker by Philip Gross (three years on) 41; Jouissance by William Scammell (two years) 38; Disbelief by John Ash ...”

“... the novel that demonstrate what Hitchcock was really up to. The most notable of these is a music-hall performer called Mr Memory. In the film’s opening scene, he answers the questions fired at him by the music-hall audience with absolute infallibility, as long as they concern matters of fact. His performance has two ...”