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“... to Yachtspersons, Comedians and Gospel Groups, requires a ‘good health certificate’, chest X-ray, HIV test result and statement of good character ‘from your local police authorities’. China asks if you have a ‘serious mental disorder’ or infectious pulmonary tuberculosis. Saudi visas are in the gift of the Ministry of Foreign Affairs. You must ...”

“... that Berryman began to write his Dream Songs with a song he later ‘killed’: The jolly old man is a silly old dumb with a mean face, humped, who kills dead. There is a tall who loves only him. She has sworn ‘Blue to you forever, Gray to the little rat, go to bed.’ I fink it’s bads all over.It ends: Henry and Mabel ought to but can’t. Childness ...”

“... on Sixth Avenue in New York while earning a living (just about) as a cleaner, busboy and removals man. At night, he sometimes took to the streets to declaim Shakespeare soliloquies, freed by the thought that he needed no one’s permission to play ‘Prospero, Falstaff, Shylock or Macbeth’ in the dark of the city:If the hour was late and you heard the sound ...”

“... lying on the grass with a girl – a girl who had not been so circumspect as my aunt, with a man who was ignorant of the best local courting geography. In this way, we hoped to see sex in flagrante. I don’t think we ever did but sometimes a man in dark blue – navy blue – bell-bottoms would rise from a clearing in ...”

“... the regimented hostility of his opponents, fuelled by racially charged resentment of a black man in the White House. No one can blame Obama for his reluctance to provoke racist violence, yet no matter how cautiously he proceeds, he can never satisfy his right-wing detractors. The other explanation is that Obama was never that radical in the first ...”

“... void, and I doubt your Omnipotency will never speak the word for such a creation, as any honest man shall say when he hath looked upon it, that it is very good.’ The authorities were concerned, though, by a related image in Book One which describes Satan’s obscured glory: as when the sun new ris’n Looks through the horizontal misty air Shorn of his ...”

“... and the country. And whenever we think ministers cannot sink any lower, they do: the proposal to x-ray the teeth and skeletons of underage asylum-seekers to see whether they are in fact children (and thus eligible for more generous treatment) is scarcely believable. The anti-terror legislation has only turned the screw. Although terror is a problem partly of ...”

“... in Asquith’s Cabinet: ‘I have often thought that your father would have been a happier man if he had taken an occasional glass of whisky, as I do.’ Derry is ebulliently confident of soon tasting the fruits of high office.27 March 1997. Seated next to John Prescott at lunch at the Chamber of Shipping. Am careful not to mention the last ...”

“... Fair in New York City, the wilder half of the Perry Lane crowd was on the bus too, and the man at the wheel was Neal Cassady, the legendary long-distance driver of Jack Kerouac’s On the Road. Stone was part of the Perry Lane crowd, but when the hijinks began to eat into his writing time he slipped away. Kesey’s voyage east with the Merry Pranksters ...”

“... Duke Ellington’s ten-man group of 1927-32 was billed for a time as the Jungle Band, a title in keeping with the Southern plantation/Afro-Deco interior and exotic-erotic floor shows of the Cotton Club, the grandest Harlem venue (it seated more than six hundred), where Ellington performed, before whites only, for the five years from 1927, and in the spring seasons of 1933, 1937 and 1938 ...”

“... who ‘stretched out like a cat, and rolled/The bitterish taste of beer upon his tongue’. Or the man in ‘Modes of Pleasure’ whose triumphs ‘recurred/In different rooms without a word’, but now, older, he sits rigid, ‘brave, terrible,/The will awaits its gradual end.’ Gunn, born in 1929, studied at Cambridge before he fled England for California ...”

“... to be as much as 90 per cent of the work, each epic could easily have been composed by one man, but really it was, as Vico had suggested, the work of a whole people, who had been rehearsing it for generations, with hundreds of years to get it right. The Black Stone had not come from nowhere. Homer was a mere pinnacle projecting above the surface, part ...”

“... problematic, not to say question-begging. No physician can pop a thermometer into the brain or X-ray the heart. Whatever its nature or function, pain is felt. As Rey observes, it is best conceived of not as a raw physical sensation but as an experience (feeling filtered through culture). Not least, the dubious desire among nonsense medics to distinguish ...”

“... gang in town’ machismo. Phillips evokes the great ‘punk icon’ Poly Styrene of X-Ray Spex as an exceptional forerunner, but Phillips’s vision of punk has, in essence, been replanted and redreamed in America in a dozen different varieties: hardcore, straight edge, Riot Grrrl etc. This is punk rock as shorthand for a whole ...”

“... take another number. That fantasy took me as comfortably as it was possible to be through a death-ray session. Once or twice, to see a doctor and to have blood taken, the Poet and I took our seats, and became one with the silent mass of cancer patients and their friends or family. I often tried to go past without looking, but it was impossible. I tried ...”