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“... powers of the 18th-century Church and the new, irrational ardour of the Methodism of the fields and hillsides. Pervading both the Established Church and the world of Dissent, it gave itself to Jesus with a thoroughgoing system and practicality: it enforced literal belief in the Bible, extreme Sunday observance, and the primacy of missionary ...”

“... add the 19 million cellphones currently in use, double last year’s number. In Santa Barbara, a small town of some six thousand people in the isolated rainforest of the Pacific coast, now reeling under the impact of coca cultivation forced westward over the Andes by US-instigated aerial fumigation, sixty teenage boys were circling the plaza ...”

“... killed his father in a fight;/And now he’ll take his mother’s blood’), or his description of fields as ‘dewy cemeteries … white with mushroom tombs’. Still, it’s true that for all his talk of waiting for poems to come naturally, his persona can seem forced and theatrical. Shaw suspected that he’d read no poets later than Cowper and Crabbe, and ...”

“... set of questions. Carcanet’s increasingly impressive list of American poetry also includes Barbara Guest’s Selected Poems. Like Ashbery, whose work she admires. Guest frequently uses the vocabulary and tone of art criticism ‘hard edges’, ‘colour ...”

“... first two of its six stanzas go: I am in a long train gliding through England, Gliding past green fields and gentle grey willows, Past huge dark elms and meadows full of butter-cups, And old farms dreaming among mossy apple trees. Now we are in a dingy town of small ugly houses And tin advertisements of cocoa and Sunlight Soap, Now we are in a dreary ...”

“... back into the world of academic thinking and reading, as of conversing and living. In both fields, she suggests, the effect can only be therapeutic. She does not mention Mary McCarthy or Fanny Assingham, both of whom seem to claim that the gossip market can be played – judiciously – for higher stakes than that. Nor does she make much of the gossip ...”

“... literature of which he was once at the heart’. Can this truly be done? John was sent to Summer Fields, and left in 1921 with an Eton scholarship and a report that he was ‘never likely to do anything dishonourable or mean’, a golden lad, as Wright calls him. About Eton he was at best lukewarm. He had wished not to disappoint his father, but he was a ...”

“... noticing symptoms and making prognoses even when the explanation for what is happening is obscure. Barbara McClintock’s attention to her fields of maize was that of a natural historian; so was Alexander Fleming’s observation of the mould on his Petri dish. Galileo’s telescope had shown that the heavens were ...”

“... forces. Conspiracy theorists often possess a wealth of accurate knowledge in such arcane fields as ballistics and acoustics, the workings of the Carcano rifle and the topography of downtown Dallas. It was an anti-Warren buff, Sylvia Meagher, who first indexed the 26 volumes of evidence published under the auspices of the commission. Some critics of ...”

“... fire is beautiful and blood a vital and splendid red . . . (this from the preface to Major Barbara). In darkest London appearances could be deceptive. Those belligerent women who ambushed the hapless male on his way to the public house were not, as might be supposed, harpies eager to lure him into more vicious courses. They were Salvationist ...”

“... from Morris, and offered instruction in furniture design, textiles and metalwork – all fields that, by the end of the decade, the Bauhaus would also embrace. Among the artists in the circle around Debschitz were the sculptor Clara Rilke-Westhoff, the painter Gabriele Münter, and Münter’s teacher and sometime lover Wassily Kandinsky. No longer ...”

“... by several of its members, including Nina Searl, Ella Sharpe, Susan Isaacs, Donald Winnicott and Barbara Low). Ernest Jones, the President and later Freud’s biographer, was enthusiastic (‘absolutely heart-and-soul whole-hogging pro-Melanie’, according to James Strachey). In July 1925 Klein visited London to give a course of lectures on child ...”

“... Fifty years ago, Barbara Tuchman’s bestseller The Guns of August taught a generation of Americans about the origins of the First World War: the war, she wrote, was unnecessary, meaningless and stupid, begun by overwhelmed, misguided and occasionally mendacious statesmen and diplomats who stumbled into a catastrophe whose horrors they couldn’t begin to imagine – ‘home before the leaves fall,’ they thought ...”

“... the smokey darkness. These endearing celebrations of place glisten in the firelight, when the rock fields they represent are lost in the inevitable sea-fret, the mist drifting down from the hills.But they have to go, these images. They have to be stacked away in the reserve collection, along with the Fontana, the emulsion-on-hardboard multi-head portraits on ...”

“... Stalinism. He and Robert Conquest had also been amused by advance word of Larkin’s letters to Barbara Pym (‘I bet they were a bit different in tone from what he writes to you and me, eh?’). At the same time, he was unsettled by finding out how much Larkin had kept from him of his arrangements in Hull – principally the depth of his involvements with ...”