“... almost continuously in Birmingham. The city was his imaginative centre: what Paterson had been to Williams and Gloucester, Mass. to Olson. Those American precedents would come to matter over the years, but in Fisher’s early work the co-ordinates were set by Eliot, Rilke and Urban Renewal. The waste land in City is Birmingham, gutted by postwar development ...”

“... abbreviated as the Dictionary’s. Was it fear, diffidence or shame, for instance, that made Eric Blair rechristen himself at the start of his career? As Christopher Hollis tells us: ‘The reasons he gave for changing his name are oddly unconvincing. He complained that Blair was a Scots name and that he disliked Scotland because of its association with ...”

“... used the law against political opponents. The example given here concerns the bookseller Thomas Williams, who was charged with blasphemy for publishing Tom Paine’s Age of Reason. Although Paine said that the Bible described a devil under the name of God, his real offence was of course his support of the revolutions in America and France. Blake remarked ...”

“... it, as though the duffing-up were more important than dealing with Orwell’s own writing. Raymond Williams is taken behind the bike sheds for a particularly nasty going-over; repetition of another kind adds to the problem here, since the substance of this long section was first delivered at the Hay-on-Wye literary festival in 1999 (as the Raymond ...”

“... documentary element in much late Modernist American writing, and epics such as William Carlos Williams’s Paterson or Charles Olson’s Maximus Poems (set in Gloucester, Massachusetts) are in essence enormous collages that attempt to capture the spirit of a place by combining memoirs, histories, town records, overheard scraps of speech, newspaper ...”

“... matters, he shows some concern about the way things are going, and expressly approves of Bernard Williams’s neo-Aristotelian ethics; temperance, and for that matter fidelity, might be called, in Williams’s terminology, ‘thick concepts’, like mercy and honour. The prevailing tone of the book is genial, but there are ...”

“... the Beatnik era, establishing important transatlantic connections with Robert Creeley, Jonathan Williams, Lorine Niedecker and others. The break-up of his first marriage in 1964 terminated this period of relative stability, initiating the chapter of uncertainty that coincided with his first letters to Stephen Bann. At no stage in Finlay’s ...”

“... reframe them as arguments for harmony and tolerance. ‘We need to talk about white identity,’ Eric Kaufmann writes at the beginning of Whiteshift, ‘not as a fabrication designed to maintain power, but as a set of myths and symbols to which people are attached: an ethnic identity like any other.’ Kaufmann offers a simple explanation for the rise of ...”

“... The social history he practised, unlike that of his contemporaries – E.P. Thompson and Eric Hobsbawm, Albert Soboul and George Rudé – derived from a novelist’s fascination with character rather than from any interest in class structure or commitment to history from below. In his ‘Experiences of an Anglo-French Historian’, the introduction ...”

“... sounded very different to that represented by his contemporaries Elgar, Vaughan Williams or even Ethel Smyth, who, like Delius, studied in Leipzig and travelled widely.Delius’s music has a distinct and identifiable sound. He drew on Debussy’s French impressionism and Wagnerian harmony so that his works are often described as ...”

“... voice) no different from when I first met him twenty-five years ago. Dame Judi is here and Michael Williams, Dame Wendy, Lindsay A., Ron Pickup and Anna Massey, Keith Baxter, Percy Harris, who’s 90 herself, and Ralph Richardson’s widow, Mu. I am happily seated between Jocelyn Herbert and Merula Guinness, with both of whom one can be happily silly. ‘You ...”

“... way from that of the judge who in 1797 directed the jury trying Tom Paine’s publisher, Thomas Williams, for blasphemy that the Christian religion was part of the law of England. In these and endless other ways, the UK’s constitution changes constantly, blown by winds of which the actors are barely aware. Who today would like to be heard saying that ...”

“... dreams came true. Here was a music that was frightening in its implications.’ The critic Martin Williams, who persuaded Joe Termini, the owner of the Five Spot, to book Coleman’s band, wrote: ‘I believe that what Ornette Coleman is playing will affect the whole character of jazz music profoundly and pervasively.’ John Lewis agreed; so did the ...”

“... at Cambridge, Schlesinger went on to make several friends and acquaintances on the left, including Eric Hobsbawm. His early work focused squarely on class conflict. In his first academic article, written while he was an undergraduate, he presented the New England Transcendentalist Orestes Brownson as a ‘Marxist before Marx’, claiming that any other theory ...”

“... sit at home and listen to those records.’ Starting out as a fan of country and western (‘Hank Williams, Roy Rogers, Gene Autry, I was a real hillbilly freak when I was a kid’), he became captivated by jazz and blues, at first through Dinah Washington and Jimmy Scott. There were many musicians in the extended Rebennack family, and the streets of the 3rd ...”