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“... be more empowering than to sit looking at an immaculate rectangle of water, a three-dimensional David Hockney which will never be disturbed by a thrashing alien presence? Neighbours lacking this obscene quantum of liquidity might well complain about the noise, the dust, the inconvenience and the damage to their foundations. It doesn’t signify. And ...”

“... Oxford Books have been anything from six hundred pages to a thousand; Davie’s predecessor David Cecil’s Christian Verse was six hundred, while Davie runs to not more than half that. Where Cecil’s 1940 volume gave 40 pages to Browning and 14 to Coventry Patmore, in Davie both poets have sunk without trace. But such disappearances are only ...”

“... by Candace McMahon, Bishop wrote, in a foreword; ‘Upon being “bibliographed”, as Edmund Wilson put it, I find I am suffering from “mixty motions”, as a student’s paper put that.’ No one can doubt how many ‘mixty motions’ Millier’s biography, well-documented and admiring though it is, would have aroused in its fastidious and shy ...”

“... happened and always is’. That is why the dogs never cease to tear Actaeon. I last saw him in David Lodge’s Nice Work. I have suggested a certain equivalence of myth and psychology. This may mean that they are in a way rivals. In Euripides’ Hippolytus one can sense that psychology is preparing to take over from myth. The story itself is firmly ...”

“... aware of the difference between a ‘life of purity’, such as he found exemplified by the poet David Jones when visiting him in a Harrow lodging-house with Stephen Spender, and the ‘many lives of pastiche’. But he is aware of the origin of his woes. From 4 October 1953: ‘My deepest problem. I have changed families and at a terrible cost substituted ...”

“... though it had been devised by a Germany spy while his parachute was coming down to land. Not even David Puttnam could ask for anything more. In this ‘unauthorised biography’ – ‘unauthorised’ in the sense that Archer first agreed to see the author and then thought better of it – Jonathan Mantle sets out to scrutinise Archer’s career. Together ...”

“... is propelled our way by a back-coverful of pre-publication puff: ‘really marvellous’ (Colin Wilson), ‘wickedly funny’ (A.S. Byatt), ‘very nourishing entertainment’ (Dame Rebecca West). The manuscript’s progress through the hands of less enthusiastic publishers has been recorded in various gossip columns. Anne Smith, editor of the Literary ...”

“... craft to folk culture, Catholic to Protestant everyday life. Heaney met the singer and filmmaker David Hammond in the ‘pre-Troubles, upbeat folk scene Belfast of the mid-1960s’; through him, and after the move to Dublin, he ‘got to know a lot of people, north and south, who were involved with traditional music’, among them Garech Browne of Claddagh ...”

“... we arrived at the studio until the moment we left. She didn’t use a tape recorder. (Edmund Wilson said she was ‘the girl with a tape recorder in her head’.) We watched the live recording from Lorne Michaels’s office, and she went in and out of people’s dressing rooms and availed herself of the catering, but there were no interviews, and she ...”

“... pen obliterating any programme listing that included black or Irish people, gays, lesbians or David Frost’. The relationship cooled when Ken junior joined the Labour Party and ceased completely when he became leader of the Greater London Council, but for a time they lived under the same roof in an intimate and sometimes disagreeable household that ...”

“... British soldiers, French veterans from Algeria and Belgian mercenaries were recruited by Colonel David Stirling’s company, Watchguard International Ltd, for operations behind enemy lines. In the South too the nationalists were divided, with Cairo backing the Front for the Liberation of South Yemen (FLOSY) and more radical groups congregating under the ...”

“... season is the Armani retrospective at the Guggenheim. Designed by the Post-Modern artist Robert Wilson, who has draped the Frank Lloyd Wright spiral ramps with white gauze, bathed the museum in patchouli and musk, and created a Japanese soundtrack to accompany the show, the exhibition is a perfect example of the blend of fashion, art, commerce and academic ...”

“... wave of the ‘sexual revolution’, following in the wake of a shoal of similar books, including David Reuben’s Everything You Always Wanted to Know about Sex but Were Afraid to Ask, a highly dubious publication that claimed anything other than the ‘penis-vagina version of sex’ was a perversion, and Nena and George O’Neill’s Open Marriage: A New ...”

“... disparaged the culture of gift-giving on which that influence seemed to rely. The diplomat David Urquhart’s neurosis about Russian influence at Constantinople derived from his failure to persuade Ottoman officials to accept his proposals for a free-trade treaty; his Eurocentric perspective led him to smell a Russian plot. Britain used its naval power ...”

“... probably the most important book yet to appear in the dissident-Communist perspective. Fortunately David Fernbach’s translation makes it accessible (apart from a few Volapük lapses like ‘genial’ for génial) and copes ruggedly with the steeper philosophical faces. The perspective itself is questionable, however. Without objecting for a moment to the ...”