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“... serious interest, which means that three of the six sitting PS Deputies have to be dumped: virtual war between the six and their clients ensues. On the right the situation is no easier. Le Pen’s Front National (FN) is bound to take 8-9 per cent and thus one of the seats, but the Giscardian Centre-Right, the UDF, will run its own list and probably get 20 per ...”

“... than its American manifestation does a Harvard Book. But anyone looking for the full range of post-war US poetry will have to turn elsewhere. Sharing Harold Bloom’s commitment to ‘the transcendental strain’, Vendler differs over how we should read it. What she values is less the Sublime than its epistemology. While Bloom cries up the heroic Emersonian in ...”

“... in 1819, ‘except poor dear me – I have been more ravished myself than anybody since the Trojan war.’ Byron used the same tactics towards society at large as he used with women. There is a curious mixture of apparent indifference and real avidity in his attitude to social success, which Raphael understands and describes very well. ‘The more society ...”

“... of anxiety and of purpose runs through the successive generations of the 17th-century ruling class. Yet amidst the pronounced similarities between the three crises there were differences too. The cry, voiced so often at the crisis of Charles II’s reign, that ‘Forty-One is come again’ shows that contemporaries interpreted the bewildering events ...”

“... Until then, Baba Amro was considered a ‘liberated neighbourhood’.It’s the sort of working-class neighbourhood at the outskirts of the city where the middle classes normally never set foot, a neighbourhood of four or five-storey concrete buildings, sometimes covered in sheets of polished stone and usually unfinished, each squeezed up next to the other ...”

“... Cornell spent most of his life at 3708 Utopia Parkway in Queens, a plain middle-class house where he lived with his widowed mother and his younger brother Robert, who suffered from cerebral palsy. He was known in the neighbourhood as a loner who collected odds and ends, as a silent member of the Christian Science Church, as a ‘scary ...”

“... Woodcut’, Boyle remarks that ‘English poetry, whose vehicle is the language of a profoundly class-conscious culture, lacks the middle tone between verse and doggerel in which this poem like most of Faust, is written.’ Many people have wondered why it is so hard to get Goethe to sound even creditable in English, let alone like a major poet, and this is ...”

“... revealed to visiting and expatriate Americans from the Gilded Age to the Jazz Age, and after World War Two they returned to see if it was still as it had been. In 1929, the young M.F.K. Fisher had her initiation chez Aux Trois Faisans in Dijon – ‘safe in a charmed gastronomical circle’, having ‘seen the far shores of another world’. In the 1950s, the ...”

“... score an easy triumph by anticipating the answer with some textbook formula.’ The First World War, which killed Raymond and many of his playmates, provides the inevitable coda to their story: spattering the beautiful dream with blood, rendering the past futile, and disarranging the future. In its aftermath came the collapse of the aristocratic ...”

“... extinguished the genre. Yeats tries to revive it in his sequence ‘Meditations in Time of Civil War’, but his theme – the decay of the Anglo-Irish Ascendancy – and his too muscle-bound style always remind me of Stormont. It’s Protestant arrogance with a touch of Mussolini (or ‘Missolonghi’, as Yeats called him). But he gets it right in ‘In ...”

“... who didn’t do anything about her little brown teeth. In that respect they’re like the working-class people who love them.’ ‘They can’t help it,’ I said. ‘Yes they can. They’re just out of touch. Everybody’s got fabulous teeth now. Diana had great teeth. These skinny men are all a terrible throwback.’ ‘With bad teeth.’ ‘Yeah. Toilet ...”

“... was a cheesy international success, but the follow-up, Carte Blanche, degenerated into a tug of war as Tynan refused to heed the requests, suggestions and anguished pleas of those who wanted him to cut his own contribution, a playlet called ‘Triangle’, which, they said, didn’t fit the revue format and brought everything to a talky stop. Tynan was ...”

“... powers of explanation and illumination. It is sad to realise that his is no longer a (middle-class) household name. This popularising suggests in flickers what his more formal essays, decidedly not written for the general music-lover, achieve with mastery: an overview of the language and workings of classical tonality that remains unequalled in lucid ...”

“... or fugitive publishers, Williams won coterie acclaim by the end of the 1920s, and after World War Two, with much wider support from critics and trade publishers, he became a pre-eminent influence on all sorts of American writers: the young Allen Ginsberg paid him homage and copied his style, while Robert Lowell, for example, looked to Williams for a ...”

“... the world go round. Mandeville makes it clear that he is thinking of the way that wild young upper-class males, out on the town, promote the circulation of wealth. The antinomy is between virtuous frugality on the one hand, and luxury on the other, where luxury still carries its old close association with lechery, and such luxury is not exactly identifiable ...”