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“... When​ I was young I thought poetry and poetry anthologies could change the world. ‘If a man were permitted to make all the ballads,’ Andrew Fletcher of Saltoun wrote, ‘he need not care who should make the laws of a nation.’ But nationality still mattered: Seamus Heaney’s reaction to his inclusion in Blake Morrison and Andrew Motion’s 1982 Penguin Book of Contemporary British Poetry was ‘My passport’s green ...”

“... it will be born dead.”’Comyns was writing with hindsight about herself as a naive young woman who knew nothing about birth control. ‘I had a kind of idea if you controlled your mind and said “I won’t have any babies” very hard, they most likely wouldn’t come. I thought that was what was meant by birth control.’ But Sophia soon ...”

“... reaching up or lifting down a large book (invisible in this reproduction). Mack describes this young woman as pushing ‘up and away some sort of drapery or heavy curtain, almost as if she were engaged in an unveiling’. There is a certain oracular heightening here, reflected in Mack’s whole sense of the picture, as indeed perhaps in his image of Pope ...”

“... of his works. (A long-awaited life is in preparation by the leading Anglophone Cravaniste, Roger Lloyd Conover.) This lacuna is curious because although Cravan was Swiss by birth, and wrote exclusively in French, he was a mix of Irish and English by blood. I have long been fascinated by this hyperbolic but ultimately enigmatic figure, and not the least ...”

“... them, a large working-class innocent called Humberstall, in peacetime a hairdresser. An alcoholic young lieutenant, Macklin, arrives in the battery and starts up a Jane Austen Society. Its effects embrace even the bewildered Humberstall – they save his life. The battery is wiped out by enemy action. Humberstall staggers shell-shocked away, muttering about ...”

“... the pre-1914 welfare economist A.C. Pigou, whose lack of interest in ideology and keen interest in young mountaineers was supposedly deliberate cover enabling him to suborn those politically committed to the left. (As will be seen, King’s has a tradition of involvement with the Secret Service: Sir Francis Walsingham ran it for Elizabeth I.) Today the hounds ...”

“... At these schools the motto is ‘Work hard. Be nice.’ Highly qualified but often inexperienced young teachers deliver carefully structured content to students, pushing them to ‘climb the mountain to college’. They are notoriously strict: articles about KIPP quote parents calling it the ‘Kids in Prison Programme’. Whatever their misgivings, KIPP ...”

“... nirvana of ‘fifteen, ten years ago’ described by Michael Fallon, when trying to touch up young female researchers, lobby correspondents or political activists was ‘acceptable’, just harmless ‘flirtation’. Some male MPs believe they still live in that era; while one insisted that it ‘absolutely does not constitute harassment’ to call your ...”

“... Sharples team. The first is a photocopy of the original handwritten note of an interview with a young Irishman named John McGuinness, one of several friends and acquaintances of Armstrong, Hill, Conlon and Richardson taken into custody in December 1974. Although he was later cleared of any involvement, at the time of his detention the police seemed to think ...”

“... to hurry up, finish their studies and take ship to Vietnam.It’s often been said since that these young men would not have been bothered by the war if it were not for their own impending draft notices, and that they were quite prepared to let the underclass be conscripted in their stead. This is quite simply a slander. The arguments and conversations of those ...”

“... The best speech, regrettably, is David Frost’s, the best anecdote that Ned, questioned about the young man he had brought with him to supper, said: ‘If pressed, I would have to say he’s a Spanish waiter.’ Waiting at the lights this afternoon my bike slips out of my hands and slides to the floor, in the process tearing a piece out of my leg. Wendy, the ...”

“... Howl, the substitution of ‘breath’ for metre and gossip for metaphor. Adrian Henri and Roger McGough, with their sedulous imitation of the faux-naif Modernism of e.e.cummings, were just as much part of the movement as Ed Dorn, Robert Creeley or Kenneth Koch. With his Essex Poems, even Donald Davie, the very type of the English conservative ...”

“... of this sort is a staple of social art history). We hear, too, from exegetes like Roger Fry and Clement Greenberg, whose formalist approach Clark has become more patient with over the years. He also cites key figures in the Hegelian-Marxist line of critique, such as György Lukács, who have informed his thinking since his days as a ...”

“... goes mad, Rimbaud abandons writing, Lautréamont dies abnormally young): i.e. the poet’s destiny is to risk madness despair and death for the sake of a possibility of a redeeming existence by means of the secret power of the Word. In a footnote to this apotheosis of the poet as doomed super-rationalist, avatar of the ...”

“... self, squaring accounts with the past. His starting-point is the year 1926, in Monaco, where young Edmund is fashionably adrift among the gaming wheels and the champagne. An accident brings him to the notice of Roscoe Hamilton, a big-game hunter who is planning an expedition to China to track down ‘a special kind of black and white bear’. Hamilton ...”