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“... to show someone – an agnostic – what a modern poem can do, I would show them something by Lawrence Joseph, or Frederick Seidel, or Karen Solie, all different but all modern, all modo hodie, all fresh today. A poem of Solie’s is sentences in unpredictable but deep sequence in unpredictable but braced lines. It seems out of control, but isn’t; it ...”

“... he was more like Graham Greene – with whom he shared a period and many destinations – than Bruce Chatwin, who might have learned from Lewis how to be a writer who is also a brilliant disappearing act. Lewis wrote as much fiction as anything else but many of his 15 novels are out of print and his reputation rests entirely on the travel writing. He could ...”

“... seventy this year, has had just one hit single (‘Because the Night’ in 1978, co-written with Bruce Springsteen) in forty years, and the only one of her 11 albums with an unassailable reputation is her glorious debut, Horses. I’ve known many people who dearly love Horses, but I can’t recall a single person ever declaring a passion for any of the other ...”

“... are (retrogressively) infatuated with the past, don’t square up with 20th-century practice. Lawrence and Joyce held onto their roots even in exile, and there was always MacDiarmid, whose ‘Gairmscoile’ stands the Modernist argument on its head: It’s soon’, no’ sense, that faddoms the herts o’ men, And by my sangs the rouch auld Scots I ken ...”

“... captive by Iraqis, the chances were high that he would be raped. (One presumes nobody told T.E. Lawrence to ‘remember that in 75 per cent of cases when you are male-raped, you will get an erection or ejaculate. Do not worry about that . . . it does not mean that you are gay.’) In September 2003 he touched down in Basra, where he was frantically ...”

“... myth and to peculiar uncanny tales, she finds illumination in the modern novel, quoting from D.H. Lawrence, Thomas Hardy and Ford Madox Ford. Meanings for each of us are knotted into the meanings that others find in this novel or that play – a common wealth of thought unimpeded by linguistic borders. Shared stories – from the tragedies of ancient Greece ...”

“... Machiavelli and Hobbes, Gerard Manley Hopkins and Thomas Hardy, Mikhail Sholokhov and T.E. Lawrence, Baudelaire and Rimbaud, F.R. and Q.D. Leavis, Elizabeth Bowen and Virginia Woolf – this is just a small sampling. Basically, he read his way through the Marylebone public library. He periodically put this marathon on hold to sprint through ...”

“... did not receive much publicity. Some of the same faces would reemerge with the killing of Stephen Lawrence in April 1993 in Eltham, an area my companion tried to identify from our vantage point on the mound.The landscape, on both banks of the Thames, was this man’s autobiography. With no trace of New Age mysticism, the former dustman pointed out where an ...”

“... paintings, to turn to the photographs of many of Freud’s sitters (and standers and liers) by Bruce Bernard and David Dawson in Freud at Work (2006). How sleek and erotic the human body really is, you think, and what a very nice colour too. Doesn’t the benefits supervisor look good, and isn’t our queen wonderful for her age? It’s remarkable how few ...”

“... half a dozen other steamers had begun to carry freight and passengers on the Delaware, the St Lawrence, the Mississippi and Lake Champlain. Scotland’s great contribution came from the engineer William Symington, whose paddle steamer Charlotte Dundas, built in 1801, was a mechanical triumph let down in the end by his nervous backers (though it encouraged ...”