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“... would bring it into contention with ‘fresh’. Heaney’s sense of the word here (the brown earth, not the green mildew) is manifestly unmistakable, but the force of the line is partly a matter of the other sense’s being tacitly summoned in order to be gently found preposterous. Nothing can more bring home the innocent freshness of carrots with ...”

“... that ‘hearing a sentence he heard feet marching.’ In one instance he adds, ‘Syntax, N. O. Brown told me, is the arrangement of the army,’ above which, on the same page, we find: ‘The masterpieces of Western music exemplify monarchy and dictatorship.’ I do not really understand what Cage hears in Fidelio or Peter Grimes – or in any number of ...”

“... storefronts: ‘The plate-glass windows of each store were blocked out halfway up with brown butcher paper, I guess to keep people from looking in at all the emptiness.’ (Time to get in touch with Johnny Dark.) But most people are half-consciously trapped in shallow roles, which shield them from the desolation all around. One woman makes ‘a ...”

“... for the W Front?’ These were the questions he intended to put to Lancelot ‘Capability’ Brown, then at the peak of his career as the most famous and sought after landscape designer of the day, who had been booked to make an inspection of Burton Constable and give his opinion of its ‘capabilities’ for improvement. Constable’s notes are a ...”

“... other and perhaps give the impression of cream, or pale sand. Its beak is black, its claws are brown; it has black wingtips and a dark streak leading from the back of each eye. Its legs are often described by observers as ‘milky-white’. In the early 19th century there was some experimenting with different names, among them the cream-coloured plover and ...”

“... as when he mishandles the future tense in the last line of the same poem. ‘Yet until brown clay has been crammed down my larynx,’ he declares, ‘only gratitude will be gushing from it.’ Although a case could be made for this usage, as emphasising continuity, similar instances in relation to the present tense – Either cartwheels are ...”

“... a footnote; Latin ones are not. Nine lines from ‘another great poet’ (quoted by someone called Brown and Browne) stand without attribution or reference. Cross-reference within Eliot’s work, which is one way in which an editor could be truly helpful (especially as to the uncollected or stray prose), is disdained: so that Allen Tate’s remark that ...”

“... Jack Levy and Ahmad’s Irish-American mother. It is no accident, perhaps, that neither of them is brown.’ Christopher Hitchens in the Atlantic hated the novel for a great many reasons, but prominent among them is the outrageousness of Ahmad’s being ‘the nicest person in the book’. The vitriol was inevitable, given ...”

“... resentment rather than with real rage or outrage, one recalls the blustering world of George Brown, Ray Gunter and Robert Mellish – those Labour dinosaurs who used to invoke the common man but who, while envying the Tories their vowels and their ease of manner, would turn into RSMs when confronted with party dissidents like Bertrand Russell or even ...”

“... and journalism – into auxiliary volunteer militias. Between them, Harry Evans and Tina Brown raised whole regiments of foot, horse and guns; flooding the bookstores and news-stands with the reassuring visage of the hero of Panama and Vietnam. Not to say an unfeeling thing, but if there were already any symptoms of palsy in the national ...”

“... on having Barry Manilow as her guest of choice, she flew into a rage when then Governor Jerry Brown called her ‘Your Highness’ instead of ‘Your Royal Highness’. (It’s a long time, it seems to me, since monarchists were wont to boast of the credit that the Royals brought upon us overseas.) Had she been the elder sister, or even brother, she would ...”

“... of the landscape and positioned the Conservatives to exploit it in the coming fight with Gordon Brown, New Labour’s heir in waiting. ‘Imagine a Tory leader promising that when his government came in there would be no special favours for those who contribute to Conservative Party funds; for employers, businessmen and the City; for big landowners, rich ...”

“... yachtsman, avant-garde theatre and film producer, poet, translator of Elizabethan verse and Christopher Fry, and the inventor of the windscreen-wiper, starlight electric bulbs and château bottling, not to speak of his being a Rothschild. He owns Château Mouton Rothschild, which he raised to the rank of a premier cru by means of hard work and a ...”

“... is set down in a terse, almost shorthand style, we learn that Forster had been cruel as a cat to Christopher Isherwood the night before, that he had sucked up to Williams in a queenly manner and that, in the opinion of ‘The Bird’ (Vidal’s usual term for Tennessee’s person of plumage and flutter), he was an old gentleman ‘with urinestained ...”

“... fantasy is current at the moment. In ‘A Whole School of Bourgeois Primitives’, for example, Christopher Reid designs another version of England caught in a moment of buzzy stasis: Our lawn in stripes, the cat’s pyjamas, rain on a sultry afternoon and the drenching, mnemonic smell this brings us surging out of the heart of the garden: these are ...”