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“... any scandal, allowing the writer to puff and genuflect and conceal his way to glory. Take Frank Kermode’s Not Entitled, a memoir typical of a generation of men who thought things were best said by not being said at all. Plante, however, is a throwback to the days of Barbara Skelton and the Comtesse de Boigne. In the years covered by his diary, he ...”

“... cupboard, the ideal kind, the one that opens to enough depth to allow you to walk in and close the door behind you. No one does close the door – it would be weird – but the perfect stationery cupboard is one in which you could be perfectly alone with floor-to-ceiling shelves laden with neat stacks of ...”

“... novel. What is novel is the Left’s intention to drive them rapidly through Parliament, and their frank recognition that this is not compatible with our present Parliamentary and constitutional practices. The essence of these is that the party in power is bound to subject its proposals to full Parliamentary scrutiny. This in turn produces wider public ...”

“... ecosystems are distributed among different groups of birds are monopolised by a single group of close relatives. Darwin missed the boat. He decided that the finches were not closely related to each other, but belonged instead to four different groups of birds: blackbirds, grossbeaks, warblers and true finches. One group did prompt a modicum of evolutionary ...”

“... there are many influential people missing from his roster. And he doesn’t examine people close to politics (except for Karl Liebknecht and Bethmann’s private secretary, Kurt Riezler) with the result that the protracted semi-public debate about how to juggle the Americans’ demands and those of intransigent military leaders is absent. Jasper ...”

“... in large part to the great flowering of graphic design in Britain between the wars. In 1918, Frank Pick of the newly amalgamated Underground Electric Railways Company briefed the calligrapher Edward Johnston and his pupil Eric Gill to create a symbol and a typeface that would give visual identity to the unified network. The Johnston Sans lettering and ...”

“... of the poems in Early Works have a chatty, diurnal music that can also be heard in the work of Frank O’Hara or John Ashbery. Ashbery’s notion of the poem as ‘the chronicle of the creative act that produces it’ is a good description of Notley’s shapely, improvisatory poetics – full of changing weather, changing clothes, the impressions of the ...”

“... will undermine our system of government, and make participants in government less prepared to give frank if unpopular advice. People might take the opposite view: that if one could only be sure of being reported five years later, it might add incentive to the delivery of frank and unpopular advice. I have in mind one of ...”

“... obsessed at the time, she writes, with the way men used guitars, like women and video games, to be close, the way they needed a triangle to get ‘some version of intimacy’: ‘I wanted to push up close to whatever it was men felt when they were together onstage – to try to ink in that invisible thing … I joined a ...”

“... personnel towards the Soviet Union seems to have been generally neutral, and sometimes hostile. Frank Kermode recalled (in an LRB review of Martin Amis’s Koba the Dread) that he knew several intelligence officers who thought it would be no bad thing if the Russians were defeated while serving to wear down German military capability. Up until the German ...”

“... only minimal compromises with the formal demands of ‘poetry’ as she has known it, coming as close as she can on the page to the ‘poetry’ of late-night tweets, of scrawls in the margins of YA novels, except that hers stand up well when reread. Bird gets those ellipses – she gets, as well, her defiant, uneven, diary-entry rhythm – from the ...”

“... the genteel to the north and the commercial to the south. The cafés are nearly all bad, the pubs close too early, the restaurants have been here for ever without much improving (sometimes declining). The architecture, in its variety, attests to changes made long ago. The thoroughfare of New Oxford Street sliced through the St Giles slums, the infamous ...”

“... in The Little Pastry Cook (c.1922-23), which otherwise pursue their own painterly logic; seen in close-up they could easily have been made a few decades later, and it is no surprise to learn that New York School painters such as William de Kooning and Lee Krasner were fans. The white shirt of Pastry Cook of Cagnes (also c.1922-23) reveals transparent ...”

“... but she was reluctant to let clichés about the natural world attach themselves to her work. Frank O’Hara sent a letter within days of reading the interview, to congratulate ‘ma Baudelairienne actuelle’ on the central picture, George Went Swimming at Barnes Hole, But It Got Too Cold, which he said he longed to see again. He was too ...”

“... and the accident (and the birthday cake that was not picked up), for example – Altman is very close to Carver’s material; in others – the story of the couple who look after another couple’s apartment is one – he takes the faintest starting clue; in others – say the story of the wife’s old infidelity – the basic situation. This is ...”