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“... There are wonderful allusive jokes here (‘There’s something rotten in the state of D-Mark’), but there is also a sense of doom: ‘My Judaism: what I still recognise among the ruins of my existence.’ Celan writes this phrase in French. And there are subtle remarks that connect his poetry to what he imagines poetry more generally to be.[Poetry ...”

“... The poet feels that he has ‘missed / The once-in-a-lifetime portent, / The comet’s pulsing rose’. And this resignation, or retirement, is political. The direct references to politics are sleeved in melancholy, subdued by the poet’s own disappointments. In his recent work, Heaney’s self-examination has become more oblique, but less resigned. In ...”

“... cavity reeking of ‘refrigerated meat, human shit and the blended penny tang of blood’, Lara-Rose Iredale of St Thomas’s Hospital puts everything back together with needle and thread, gives the body an antibacterial sponge bath, and washes the hair in Alberto Balsam Sweet Strawberry. The brain stays out. Campbell holds one, marvelling at the ...”

“... guise of the travelling poet, he points up unfamiliar things in his new surroundings in order to mark his separation from them, yet when the poet of St Lucia speaks of his home, his language and cadence seem oddly to set him at a remove from the idiom of the island: The hospital is quiet in the rain. A naked boy drives pigs into the bush. The coast shudders ...”

“... the precursor of modern Tokyo. Roughly 7000 people were reported dead or injured, and the numbers rose in the days that followed. There were no newspapers published in the city – the shogun’s government forbade public comment on anything directly concerning the regime – but by the end of the year hundreds of woodblock broadsheets had appeared with ...”

“... this device for well over a century. As unlimited liability was phased out, leverage among banks rose from about three or four in the middle of the 19th century to about five or six at its close. Leverage continued its upward march when extended liability was removed, and by the end of the 20th century it was higher than twenty. In 2007, at its high-water ...”

“... breath’; an enlarged vocabulary; a poem ‘less perfect, less stately’. Technical changes can mark a changed worldview, but here she is marvellously consistent. As she puts it in ‘Summer Night’ (2001), Desire, loneliness, wind in the flowering almond – surely these are the great, the inexhaustible subjects to which my predecessors apprenticed ...”

“... The Wings of the Dove, The Ambassadors and The Golden Bowl. After his death in 1916 his reputation rose steadily, buoyed by T.S. Eliot and Ezra Pound in the 1920s and later by R.P. Blackmur and Lionel Trilling among other critics, who brought about the ‘James Revival’ which began in the 1940s and is still going strong. James did much in his lifetime to ...”

“... proud to assert his respectability and distinguished connections, full of scorn for men who rose from humble backgrounds into the professions or the Church. He lived frugally and despised courtly ostentation, but those qualities mark him as godly, not as a man of the people. His views on government were shifting and ...”

“... a prostitute, but leaves embarrassed and forlorn. He thinks about drugs: ‘He might even ask Rose to sell him some junk. He had not taken it before … but now the idea appealed to him powerfully. What was he saving himself for? Wasn’t hedonism as good a way as any?’ Half-hearted whoring, fighting and dissolution don’t make Clem feel any ...”

“... Yet his arguments for dividing political power hit home in America, and as the United States rose to prominence, its Montesquieuan model proved attractive to the Latin American countries in its sphere of influence. Britain and France took a different path. They repudiated Montesquieu and concentrated power in a single elected assembly, rejecting ...”

“... of much thinned siennas and umbers, with prods here and there of dun greens, whites and hot rose madder. To take the pictures in felt like slowly coming to in an unfamiliar bedroom. In each, the prods had gathered together to produce an Indian soldier. I enjoyed – and I felt that the painter had enjoyed – the visible process through which loose ...”

“... to create’. Sober liberal observers, like the International Crisis Group, an NGO founded by Mark Malloch Brown in 1995, more quietly worry about the absence of checks on presidential power in Venezuela and the possibility that Bolivia will actually fall apart. Enthusiastic radicals, like Tariq Ali and Diana Raby, suggest that a truly popular socialism ...”

“... In the summer​ of 1935, when he was 18, Robert Lowell and two friends from St Mark’s School – Blair Clark and Frank Parker – rented a house in Nantucket. Under Lowell’s direction, they studied the Bible (with special attention to the Book of Job) and ate cereal with raw honey and ‘badly’ cooked eels ...”

“... its moment, explains some of its flaws as well as its significance. Polanyi wanted to make his mark on the postwar settlement, to warn of the dangers of divorcing the economy from society. But his book received little acclaim on either side of the Atlantic. His daughter, the Canadian economist Kari Polanyi Levitt, wrote in 1990 that in England, ‘where ...”