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“... Pluviose There is a kind of sleep that falls for days on end, the foothills lost in cloud, rain in the stairwells, rainspots crossing the floor of the Catholic church and the sense of a former life at the back of our minds, as if the dead had gathered here in shapes that seemed at least familiar, if not perfect. As children, we were told they came for our sakes, bringing secrets from the cold, the loam on their eyes and hands a kind of blessing, but now they are here, in the creases and lines of our mouths, speaking through us to friends we have never seen, or only to the rain, because it sounds the way it sounded then, when they were young, setting a ladle aside, or a finished book, and the world almost come to an end, when we stopped to listen ...”

“... Faith The tent show had been and gone and now there was nothing but rust and sunlight, like a poultice on the grass, candy and broken glass and a spare tatter of hallelujah blown through the dust where somebody passing through had stopped to write a half-dozen half-formed letters we couldn’t decipher out where the trailers had stood at the edge of the night and the May Queen was lost for hours before she was missed, her mother asleep after back-shift, her father a rumour, a story the woman would tell of a distant summer; idealised, hazy at best, he had left her one morning at dawn for the Sanskrit of rain ...”

“... I walk in a shower of ice on the Finnmarksvidda: freezing rain, not snow; hard pearls of ice, stinging my face and hands as I make my way to the frozen lake. No sign of life – just scats and moulted hair; but something calls from far across the water, some elemental, lost beneath the sky, darker than flesh and blood when it calls again then waits, as if it wanted me to answer and snow beings to fall – huge, sudden flakes, drifting between the birch trees, blurring the moss, as if some festival had been resumed, the ceremony of another season ...”

“... signals the critical thrust of Murray’s book. He opposes the ‘new orthodoxy’ expounded by John Carey in his 1992 polemic, The Intellectuals and the Masses. This biography aims to vindicate Huxley as a humane thinker and artist rather than the crypto-fascist, eugenicist, public-school snob, or (in later life) the ‘fully fledged, fuzzy-brained ...”

“... metaphysical, not homespun enough. Richard Hughes was one of our most effective local magicians; John Fowles has become one; William Golding has had the status a long time. His new novel confirms him as a master craftsman in his particular sort of magic. It is beautifully constructed, it grips the reader – so much so that its effectiveness gives it the ...”

“... Annunciation with zero point field Sitting up late in the dark I think you’re about to tell me that story I’ve heard before of a creature pulled from the ice, or prised from a ditch, its body a hundred years old, but the eyes intact and hardly a trace of decay on the frost-white skin; and later, how they cut along the spine and found two spurs of cartilage above the shoulder blades: not wings, or not quite wings, but something like a memory of flight locked in a chamber of bone it had barely abandoned ...”

“... Planisphere Mysterious barricades, a headrest (of sorts), boarded the train at Shinjuku junction to the palpable consternation of certain other rubberneckers already installed in the observation car of their dreams. ‘It’s so peaceful on my pallet. I could just live here.’ In a second the deadbeat returned with lunch tokens. It had been meant to be sublime, but hell was what it more specifically resembled ...”

“... Composition We used to call it the boob tube, but I guess they don’t use tubes anymore. Whatever, it serves a small purpose after waking and before falling asleep. Today’s news – but is there such a thing as news, or even history? Yes, when you want to go back after a while and appraise the accumulation of leaves, say, in the sandbox. The rest is rented depression, available only in season and the season is always next month, a pure but troubled time ...”

“... It wasn’t meant to stand for what it stood for. Only a puptent could do that. Besides, we were in a state called New York, where only bees made sense. Those who were with us were not with us and deserved a spanking. Others, looking out over the bay’s mild waters could barely distinguish a message made of logs: ‘Return to the frontier or all is lost, though in time some may reap the benefit and glory of a frozen attitude ...”

“... in these ventutes. ‘Our modern world of high finance and international banking,’ writes Sir John Quinton, Chairman of Barclays, in the Constable catalogue, ‘shows a proper concern for all aspects of our environment, but especially for the countryside.’ Wow. It’s hard to say what is more extraordinary, the statement itself – which exonerates the ...”

“... He was subjected to even more abuse from the British press and public than Nasser or John Foster Dulles. In a widely photographed incident, Altrincham was physically assaulted. His assailant shouted to the pressmen he had summoned to watch: ‘This is for insulting the Queen!’ The papers – except the Times, which on advice from the palace ...”

“... Auerbach’s, including Kermode’s ‘Introduction to the New Testament’ and his chapter on St John’s Gospel, and Alter’s Introduction to the Old Testament and his essay ‘The Characteristics of Hebrew Poetry’ – probably the best treatment of this difficult subject now available. Attention to conventions does not mean, however, that the majority ...”

“... belongs to our God” ’. These events usher in the new heaven and earth foreseen by St John where righteousness reigns and death is no more. The present inheritors of this apocalyptic strain in Christendom, evangelical missionaries attached to Protestant Churches in the United States, are engaged, therefore, in an urgent mission to reach the last ...”

“... the National Curriculum, one of which suggests 1066 and All That as the appropriate textbook for a John MacGregor version of the history syllabus; another (mainly) on visiting heritage sites, which seems to belong to the first volume; another (mainly) on the politics of Britain in the Eighties, including two pleasingly irritable essays from 1982 on the ...”

“... back have sold getting on for $900m worth of tickets. C-3PO and R2-D2 are as well known as Pope John Paul or Mickey Mouse. Lucas’s second movie and first hit, American Graffiti (produced by Francis Coppola, conceived and directed by Lucas), was the most profitable investment in Hollywood history: it brought in $117m against a production cost of ...”