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“... Joplin is alive. Jack Kerouac is alive. Jimi Hendrix is alive. Lyndon Johnson is alive. James Jones is alive. Jim Morrison and Robert Penn Warren are alive. Richard Nixon is dead; and a Soviet-bloc skier named Ivana Trump – someone overhears Sixties psychic Jeanne Dixon saying – will assign her name to a novel she does not write with the full and ...”

“... Pasmore – there were more eccentric talents of various sizes, like Stanley Spencer and David Jones, who were very English (or very Welsh) and not international at all. In drawings of wrapped sculpture in landscape and moonstruck megaliths Moore and Paul Nash gave even Surrealism an English edge. You could find evidence of deep-rooted native ...”

“... there, and staying, for a short while at least, in an unemployed miner’s house. His friend Allen Hutt later wrote of this as a turning point in Jennings’s life: his upbringing had instilled in him a Ruskinian obsession with the impact of mechanisation on work and on ways of thinking, but he now encountered at first hand ‘the land of industry, of ...”

“... can make money out there, why can’t we?’ was the familiar theme, and there was mention too of Allen Lamb’s inclusion in the England side. Jobs Outside Cricket ranged from ‘horse-breeding’ to ‘installing fruit machines in pubs’; there is a postman, a window-cleaner, a lorry-driver, an ‘ex-steel-worker’ and a surgical ...”

“... elicited from the Prologue to the Canterbury Tales and Henry IV Part One, Keats’s Odes and Tom Jones, Emma and Tess. It is still happening, even after we have got historians to stop drilling them in the battles we won, and when geographers no longer offer them maps in which the Empire is coloured red. Penguin Books’ reissue of Boris Ford’s Pelican ...”

“... a poet to comment on his own work or even to lead his readers through a particular poem. Valéry, Allen Tate, William Empson, John Crowe Ransom, Robert Penn Warren and Robert Lowell were instructive in that way. But it is rare for a poet to lead readers through a poem, draft by draft, or explain how he settled for one word rather than another. Yeats did not ...”

“... the ears of the Dulles brothers: John Foster Dulles, secretary of state, and his little brother, Allen, head of the CIA. Both were former legal advisers to United Fruit. Stephen Kinzer and Stephen Schlesinger’s classic history of the coup, Bitter Fruit (1982), showed that many of the players behind it were either United Fruit stockholders, or angling for a ...”

“... of Liberation for the Demystification of Violence at the Roundhouse. His sobering report had Allen Ginsberg and R.D. Laing, Trocchi, Michael X, and other disparate luminaries of the International Times devouring every word. We wanted to hear the worst, the spidery voice of doom: the prophetic voice of the Ancient of Days, Blake’s voice hallucinated in ...”

“... In Northanger Abbey, Austen enacts the conventional belief in the frivolity of dress by having Mrs Allen, Catherine’s chaperone, make embarrassing and comic remarks about finery – its details, its price – in every other utterance. At the same time, however, Henry – who isn’t laughed at – knows all about fashionable muslins, and discusses them ...”

“... for himself. He knew and admired Hastings, and was a friend of the great orientalist Sir William Jones, scholar of Persian and Sanskrit, and, as Mr Jones, a member of the Club, present at Boswell’s election. When Johnson first wrote to Hastings on 30 March 1774, recommending to him the future Sir Robert Chambers, one of ...”

“... role in what was supposed to be a French war from an impeccable source – the CIA. George Allen worked on Indochina from 1949 to 1975, by far the longest involvement of any American, a fly on the wall at the decisions of a quarter-century. Allen is a real-life quiet American who saw his job as answering the ...”

“... for not being commented on – there’s no weary acknowledgment of her parents’ love of Edgar Allen Poe. The arbitrarily invoked Gothic strain is taken fairly far: ‘Sometimes in the night she would call out this name, her own, “Lenore!” in a strong urgent voice, and Helen in her own room would shudder and cry a little.’ Then there are heightened ...”

“... be a master builder, and his achievements ranged from the elegant – the Art Deco bathhouses at Jones Beach on Long Island – to the catastrophic: the Cross-Bronx Expressway, which destroyed thriving neighbourhoods and displaced thousands of people. By 1968, when Moses was finally forced from power, the catastrophes had become impossible to ignore. The ...”

“... the picture-postcard commentary he has always been asked to provide. There was no Robert Frost or Allen Ginsberg in space, but we have Buzz: ‘Our blue and brown habitat of humanity appeared like a jewel of life in the midst of the surrounding blackness. From space there were no observable borders between nations, no observable reasons for the wars we were ...”

“... slackened its grip. In 1978 he published Narrow Rooms, which was turned down in Britain by W.H. Allen and eventually came out from Black Sheep Books of Godalming. It had a rough ride elsewhere too, its German translation becoming the subject of a prosecution for indecency brought by a women’s group, during which every word of the novel was read out in ...”