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“... national vanity.) Ehrenpreis’s judgments are better than judicious: they vibrate, as do all the best Augustan antitheses, with a succinct indignation at how cruelly unbalanced is the world which their balanced phrases contain. ‘Ireland was ruined by a policy which added the burdens of a kingdom to the disabilities of a colony.’ (It is the scrannel ...”

“... as a distinctively 1950s sensibility. The new generation of poets, dominated by the Big H brands (Geoffrey Hill, Ted Hughes, Tony Harrison, Seamus Heaney), were prosodically and thematically more ambitious. And the cultural mood of the later decades of the 20th century was not indulgent to the perceived misogyny and Little Englandism of Larkin and Amis when ...”

“... know more about the history of the 16th century than I know about anything else; I have spent the best years of my life in reading and writing about it.’ The Tudors were familiar, but they hadn’t hitherto been known: no one had ever supposed that they were worth knowing about. Bluff King Hal, Bloody Mary, the Queen of Scots, the Virgin Queen: like Drake ...”

“... it seems almost indelicate to point out that it is completely false. In fact, almost all of the best-known literary theorists engage in close reading: witness Roman Jakobson on Baudelaire, Roland Barthes on Balzac, Fredric Jameson on Conrad, Julia Kristeva on Mallarmé, Edward Said on Jane Austen, Paul de Man on Proust, Gilles Deleuze on Kafka, Gérard ...”

“... can humanism be persevered with? Or is a faith in humanism now wishful thinking? Perhaps our best chance of advancing through the minefield is to be a fool, to kid ourselves, and try to think of courage.The Vietnam War, a film made by Ken Burns and Lynn Novick, comes in ten parts, with beginnings, middles and end credits; and lasts 18 hours ...”

“... to the Music of Time; and the memoirs, journals and journalism. Afternoon Men might not be the best of the early books, but on the other hand it might, and it’s certainly characteristic of the world and manner of the period – like Waugh’s Decline and Fall it has the attractive bloom of first-book freshness. It is told mainly in dialogue; it describes ...”

“... or silenced. A particularly flagrant example has been the shameful concerted hounding of Professor Geoffrey Blainey. The republican aspiration keeps mainly illiberal company now, and disapproves of most Australian realities. Our republic of letters has become pretty much a Soviet one, not precisely in its ideology – being Broad Left, the line is not ...”

“... the permanent literary consciousness,’ says O’Brien almost ruefully, noting also that what is best in Larkin is ‘largely lost among his many imitators’. But what nobody (including the editors of these anthologies) asks is why we spend so much time complaining about Little Englandism, cynical restraint and suburban Toryism while persisting in raising ...”

“... take the form of enrolling in an atelier. The teachable element in literature might, after all, be best taught even to poets by an attention not to their own poems or to their master’s, but to poets not alive or not in the room. Or it might be taught by the private solicitudes of friendship (Hopkins and Bridges) or by the public educings and adducings of a ...”

“... of home life and sent him to school. But the interests of those street years survived. He and his best friend, the satanic Piotr Winowski, did little in class but madden their teachers and spent most of their time in the cinema, looting the dustbins for discarded lengths of film after the performances. The first films were coming in from the West, and ...”

“... the exhibition: William Empson, Seamus Heaney, Charles Tomlinson, Salman Rushdie, Robert Lowell, Geoffrey Hill. The only other bare feet besides Walcott’s belong to a corpse on a dissecting table in front of Keith Simpson, the forensic pathologist. An illegible name-tag is attached to a big toe. St Lucia may not be the Isle of Man, but legs matter here. By ...”

“... and Neo-Romantic poetasters, mostly, with Edith Sitwell and Roy Campbell as potential allies, Geoffrey Grigson lurking threateningly in the wings and T.S. Eliot a very distant god. The former Muriel Camberg joined this cast in 1944 after a stint in southern Africa, where she’d ended a short marriage to the unstable if catchily named Sydney Spark. She ...”

“... acquired a number of illustrious admirers – including those poetic polar opposites, Geoffrey Hill and John Ashbery – his poetry is still not widely known. ‘Soldiers Bathing’, it’s true, is likely to feature in any anthology or critical account of the poetry of the Second World War, and assiduous scholars of both Hill and Ashbery have ...”

“... MPs and not always against marginal Labour MPs either, and many individual candidates doing their best to signal their distance from their own party leadership – the possible outcomes of the election have resolved themselves into a binary choice. Either Johnson wins a majority, in which case the UK will almost certainly leave the EU on 31 January 2020. Or ...”

“... Eleanor grows close to Fulk’s daughter, Alyson – a reimagining of Alysoun, the Wife’s best friend. (Modern retellings of the Wife of Bath often leave out the second Alysoun.) In Brooks’s version, Eleanor takes Alyson with her as she passes through her various households, and eventually realises that she needs her friend more than any man. When ...”