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“... who had said he would walk over his own grandmother to serve the President, and who, in his own frank admission, was responsible for many a dirty trick, which he now regrets bitterly. Even before he went to prison, after the disclosures connected with Watergate, he had undergone a very remarkable Christian conversion. When he emerged, he not only wrote a ...”

“... full the widespread silliness of the Thirties about Russia. ‘Harold was able to have perfectly frank discussions with Maisky, who found him safe as well as sympathetic.’ He felt ‘stricken to the dust’ by the Russo-German pact of 1939, sharing the astonishment with many innocent leftists. Several years later he could still write: ‘Not that I have ...”

“... gains, and so does the world at large.’ Brunel’s fame eclipsed that of his father. His close friend Daniel Gooch, whose memoirs and diary only became generally available after 1972, called him ‘the greatest of England’s engineers’. Vaughan, who has written many books on railways, does not question Brunel’s genius, yet he accuses Rolt of the ...”

“... perpetual itinerancy. She began by writing free verse – her early work tended to emulate Frank O’Hara and other New York poets – and now composes mostly in rhyme and off-rhyme. She completed her third collection, Shoulder Season (2010), in Beirut. But her ‘poet baptism in the Mediterranean’, which brought an ‘altered relation to ...”

“... his teeth upturned into a wicked smile within his skull; his eyeballs are intact, wide and frank as in modern manga. The pinch of the curtain beneath his fingertips foreshadows the horror to come. In its purest form, manga refers only to serialised comic books, always black and white and read from right to left, back cover to front cover. At the ...”

“... the building from scratch of new museums as vast containers for huge artwork, as exemplified by Frank Gehry’s Guggenheim Bilbao. In some respects this bigness is the outcome of a space race between architects like Gehry and artists like Serra, and by now it seems almost natural to us. Yet there is nothing definitive about it: well-regarded artists who ...”

“... New Zealand, all national dots. Not all poets love places. And not many poets love cities the way Frank O’Hara loved New York. Crawford, like his nearest literary forebear Norman MacCaig, loves places both rural and urban: in his work, he can throw his voice ‘deep down the larynx of Glen Esk’, and he can marry Iona, or bring the reader into ...”

“... and memories, rammed together in a style Hugh Kenner called ‘unmortared’, Joyce came close to inventing a language that seemed to contain the mind’s endless restlessness.Lucy Ellmann’s new novel, Ducks, Newburyport, does not, despite the claims of some reviewers, consist of a single sentence (I counted 880). But it does contain one very long ...”

“... entrants, including two vicars and the mayor of Norwich. The following year the final was won by Frank Hadow, ‘a big-game hunter who ran a coffee plantation in Ceylon and who returned there after the tournament never to be seen at Wimbledon again’. Tennis’s international appeal derived from its dependability (it could be played on lawns, but also on ...”

“... Hunt his house when it appeared she might figure in divorce proceedings. His explanation was quite frank: it was a matter of her ‘position’, and by implication of his. I really don’t see how an old friend of yours could feel or pronounce your being in a position to permit of this [public scandal] anything but ‘lamentable’, lamentable – oh ...”

“... because a) his poems are often dirty to the point of showing you stuff that might make you close your browser window quickly; b) the dirtiness tends to be very carefully shaped, as though the sexual energy is formed by generations of artful convention, so that you could well imagine that if he had actually been into bondage (and who knows?) it would ...”

“... said to myself Guillaume it is time that you came’). This trait Apollinaire in turn passed on to Frank O’Hara, who acknowledged the debt in ‘Memorial Day 1950’, in which O’Hara figures himself reading music by the light of ‘Guillaume Apollinaire’s clay candelabra’. Yet a note of uncertainty not really found in the American poets often pervades ...”

“... subjected to as a young man, describing the Vienna experiences as ‘an escape into reality’. Frank Kermode was listening and, much moved, wrote to Keller: ‘I filled out, with my own fears, the understatements of your talk. I suppose it must be that the school bully, the military sadist, and perhaps oneself in certain moments are, though insignificant ...”

“... the right to own guns ‘granted by God to all Americans as our American birthright’. But as Frank Smyth points out in his new history of the NRA, the organisation was actually founded because a group of Union Army veterans were dismayed by how few Americans actually knew how to shoot, particularly compared with Europeans. According to one of its ...”

“... use of it. It is a method of both inhabiting a character and keeping a distance: the author gets close to the subject by using the language the character himself might use, but refuses to contaminate all of her language thus. In Persuasion, Austen introduces Mr Shepherd like this: Mr Shepherd, a civil, cautious lawyer, who, whatever might be his hold or his ...”