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“... overall effect as the blurb-writer would have us believe. Heaney’s strength resides still in the short lyric, of which a group of 25 makes up the first part, and, I believe, the core, of the collection. Here Heaney has managed to give a further resonance to his precise descriptions of ‘small’ fixtures of the physical world:When I poured itit had a ...”

“... plus the non-fiction Raw Spirit: In Search of the Perfect Dram (2004), and the usual amount of short stories, introductions, articles and ephemera. He began with The Wasp Factory in 1984, and never stopped. His final novel, The Quarry, was almost complete by the time he received his cancer diagnosis in March this year. He died on 9 June. ‘On the morning ...”

“... work.’ That may be why his new collection begins in 1979, omitting as much of his published short fiction as it includes. The culture had changed, and so had DeLillo’s writing. The hippies of the hinterlands and the freaks in Times Square had ceded their place at the centre of cultural attention to yuppies, and by the time of ‘Creation’, the first ...”

“... mistakenly thought might be renewed and fortified, disappeared from view.’ It was Fascism, in short, which helped to close down the Criterion, a point overlooked by those for whom Eliot and his magazine were themselves of this persuasion. In fact, Eliot was not a Fascist but a reactionary, a distinction lost on those of his critics who, in the words of ...”

“... a reprint of the 1974 volume of that name, which is now out of print, is a sequence of 40 short or shortish poems lacking the manifest philosophical concerns of the poems that precede it. It offers itself as an easy, even casual topographical record of England, county by county in alphabetical sequence, almost like an ‘Oxford Book’. But this is in ...”

“... the fourth piece – I missed it. Could you get it for me?’ I sent it over that evening. In a short while he called back to ask that I talk to Newman and obtain, as hypothetically as possible, his estimate about Cuban response to an invasion.Allowing for Schlesinger’s retrospective, self-serving grace-notes (one has to love the placing of the word ...”

“... reworked by later authors, the subject could also be approached as a history of reception. Philip Hardie’s impressively learned Celestial Aspirations touches on all these aspects, with an emphasis on reception history. As a Latinist, he is interested in the long afterlife of classical myths, themes and images of celestial ascent, and traces them ...”

“... professional ambitions, nurtured by the example of two brilliant forebears whose lives were cut short prematurely. Grandfather Toynbee had been a successful London doctor until his self-inflicted experiments with chloroform went fatally wrong. An even more striking exemplar was the remarkable career at Balliol College, Oxford of Uncle Arnold, after whom not ...”

“... currents or lay at anchor perishing with cold – it was nearly mid-winter down there – and very short of food. Then against the advice of the experienced Davis, who said the snow would not last, Cavendish turned back, with the notion of reaching the Far East by way of the Cape, having refitted somewhere in South America. The ships separated in a blow off ...”

“... associations, the degree of autocratic control imposed on the nationalist movement seems little short of miraculous. Even the splitting-off of the separatist Muslim League did not impair this characteristic. It meant that when the British came to leave in 1947 the matter could be settled by half a dozen men in a small room. The achievement was above all one ...”

“... off. ‘Where is it?’ Starkey’s account of what the martyrologist John Foxe called, in the short novel included in his Book of Martyrs, ‘the miraculous preservation of the Lady Elizabeth’, is detailed and thorough, one of the most insightful short histories of the reign of Mary, and it corrects many supposed ...”

“... who made up with diligence what he might have lacked in brilliance.’ The claims he made for his short stories are those of a lacklustre publicist: ‘my only duty was to describe reality as it had come to me – to give the mundane its beautiful due.’ Of his choice to make suburban life his primary subject, he said: ‘Out there was where I ...”

“... mean they’re not true.’ The grandfather, David Cartwright, aka the Old Bastard or OB for short, knows what he’s talking about, as he was the power behind the throne at the Park for decades. The grandson, River Cartwright, once a promising recruit at the Park, has just been relegated to a dead-end job pushing paper or sorting through the contents of ...”

“... the dangers of taking office without a majority: Labour was dependent on Liberal tolerance. The short life of the government entrenched a distrust of coalitions and alliances that Labour has never fully shed. For all sections of the party, the memory of 1924 was sullied by the failure of the second Labour government, elected in 1929 and led again by ...”

“... of Soweto, outside Johannesburg. I sat with Lafont in his ill-lit office at the back of St Philip Neri, his parish church. The adjacent bedroom had been turned into a drop-in dormitory for young boys and as the night drew on it filled up. At regular intervals the office door would be pushed ajar and a bashful face would appear. A few words would be ...”