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“... Man was old and wild. He was raw nature against the pasteurised alternative, that eco-milkshake of green politics, donkeys in city farms, traumatised sheep dancing to the beat of Danny Boyle’s sensational Wagnerian lightshow. Before he left London, with a cheque secured for him by a diligent Dalston Lane solicitor, Mr Mills agreed to meet me for lunch. I ...”

“... Robert​ Louis Stevenson was always ill, that’s what people said, and in the late summer of 1884 he decided he wouldn’t return to the South of France, where he’d spent the past year and a half in a house called La Solitude. His wife, Fanny, sought the advice of his London doctors, who recommended Davos in the Swiss mountains as being cholera-free, but Stevenson fancied southern England ...”

“... into the tunnel. He was run over and killed by an approaching train. The funeral was at Kensal Green cemetery off the Harrow Road, a vast city of the dead which, like so many graveyards nowadays, seems itself to have died. It occurred to me, looking at it, that people used to keep the surroundings of their dead alive for them, but nowadays they let the ...”

“... delicate passages: as with Mayakovsky, they are mostly about animals. In a poem called ‘Lines to Robert Lowell’, for instance, there are these lines on Arthur Miller’s dog Hugo: You’re not a dachshund, you’re a slipper, a moccasin with a gaping sole, shabby with use. A certain Unknown Being puts you on his left foot and shuffles across the ...”

“... bit yet. Black gets pregnant. Nicholson expresses his displeasure to his workmate Elton (Billy Green Bush), who tells him parenthood isn’t so bad, he’s taken to it himself. Dupea is outraged at the association. ‘It’s ridiculous. I’m sitting here listening to some cracker asshole who lives in a trailer park compare his life to mine.’ Because ...”

“... the unending monochrome winter and the brief summers that are all leaves and insects and blue and green sparkle. His poems, one reads, have been translated into fifty, then sixty, and at the last seventy, languages (which is extraordinary for anyone writing in a ‘small’ language, much less a poet). In 2011 he was awarded the Nobel Prize for ...”

“... of James Roper, Anna’s great-grandfather. This describes a trip to the Veneto in the company of Robert Browning and the love of his late years, Mrs Bronson. The diary explains that Roper married into the Italian family which was given the Bellini Madonna by the artist in the 16th century in lieu of a debt. It’s written in a style that’s perhaps ...”

“... as it rises: blue limestone in the Vale of Pickering gently diminishes, giving way to a dark green desig­nating the chalk cliffs of the Yorkshire Wolds. The result is an intricate marbling, whose striations appear as many multi­colour­ed shorelines woven into an undul­ating whole. A key floats in the North Sea (mark­ed here as ‘The German ...”

“... on a rock. ‘These are the stamps on the final envelope,’ he wrote, zeroing in on a yellow-green cluster of living organisms existing at a speed accessible to red-eyed witness. And accessible to this former Chicago copywriter with the profile and presence of the actor Jon Hamm in Mad Men. Welch, a troubled man, a drinker, was tall, red-haired, a ...”

“... such as food stamps and prescription drugs for the elderly, will no longer be eligible for green cards. It is estimated that this may affect twenty million poor children, 90 per cent of whom are US citizens. Moreover, the 447 pages of regulations (‘Inadmissibility on Public Charge Grounds’) are so deliberately complicated that they will undoubtedly ...”

“... towards anything that smacks of modernisation. Croucher spies on lovers, dyes his enemies’ milk green, stuffs potatoes up their exhaust pipes: he disguises himself as a pest officer, a Greek Orthodox priest, a knapsacked botanist, a video librarian (who can transform enthusiastic commercials into Buñuel-like fantasies of gluttony and nausea). Croucher ...”

“... as the archetypal Delta bluesman, a precursor to Charley Patton, Son House, Skip James and Robert Johnson: vagrants, rounders, always on the move – pursued, as Handy put it, by ‘suffering and hard luck’, conceiving their music ‘in aching hearts’. Hari Kunzru’s new novel is, among other things, a fictional meditation on the figure of the ...”

“... Delafield, whose Diary of a Provincial Lady appeared in Time and Tide in the 1930s and whose ‘Robert’ is similarly laconic, impassive and discouraging. This fairly benign fiction, created perhaps as much for herself as for her daughters, concealed the painful truth that Desmond drank too much, spent too much and went from one unsuccessful job to ...”

“... Forum, Jacobs had contrasted ‘Olympian’ town planners such as New York’s quango despot Robert Moses, addicted to models and graphics, seldom getting out of their cars, with ‘pavement-pounders’ like Bacon and the shopping mall designer Victor Gruen, who knew Philadelphia well and explored it on foot. But when Bacon took her to a ‘bad ...”

“... the offices of a nice man at the Salvation Army, he finds out that one of them actually exists: Robert Cove, an older brother he never knew, his parents’ illegitimate child, given up for adoption at a time when the darkest English secret was to admit that a serving soldier might be sleeping with another man’s wife. Roland arranges to meet ...”