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“... during this visit that Hughes and Assia fell in love. Sensing this, Plath saw her visitors off, Reid notes, ‘in a mood of tension and unvoiced rage’. Hughes and Assia would afterwards meet clandestinely in London, until an argument during a visit by Plath’s mother, Aurelia, caused Hughes to leave Plath. In the late summer, Hughes writes to Olwyn that ...”

“... Alcmanics (or is it Alcaics?) – and one of the few to describe our current impoverishments. Christopher Reid’s interrogation of language expresses itself in an interest in translationese. Katerina Brac seems to have arisen from a long immersion in Oxford and Penguin books of verse in translation. Its language is a kind of anti-dialect ...”

“... with the hope of forcing his reader to admire the justice of those similes and metaphors. Christopher Ricks need look no further (certainly not across the Irish Sea) for textual substantiation of his theory of the self-reflexive image.Here, as before, the best of Raine’s poems present something more than a concatenation of metaphors, effective ...”

“... to those who have one without the other. Those who have both will find that, among contemporaries, Christopher Reid and Michael Hofmann are classified as love poets but Craig Raine and Tony Harrison as blue versifiers. Only a few poets make both, including Seamus Heaney, who has two poems unworthy of him in the Whitworth (one about unfreezing a vaginal ...”

“... are otherwise uninterpretable. If we start presuming that, inter alia, Douglas Dunn, Craig Raine, Christopher Reid, Anne Stevenson, Paul Muldoon, Medbh McGuckian and James Fenton are absent because Davie thinks they play no significant part in this history, then what are we to make of the omissions of J.H. Prynne and Roy Fisher, heroes of Davie’s ...”

“... man’. Most Shakespeareans remain utterly unpersuaded by any of this, and the letters printed by Christopher Reid in his excellent 2007 collection show that Hughes was both wounded and unsurprised by the professional response: ‘What a pity the Times didn’t give my book to somebody who wasn’t straitjacketed inside the English Tripos,’ he wrote to ...”

“... and that is also written, in their various ways, by Fuller, by Michael Hofmann, Tom Paulin, Christopher Reid and others. Certainly the romantic rhetoric that is second nature to Larkin, as to Auden, Yeats and Eliot, has no place in their poetic repertoire. It once seemed so ‘natural’, but beside their literariness and air of non-communication ...”

“... A really nasty, dirty little war … Waste of time, money and everything else’ was the way Christopher Bilney, who served as a seaplane pilot in the Caucasus in 1919, remembered it in old age. He was one of many British veterans whose memories of Allied intervention in the Russian Civil War of 1918-20 were ‘uneasy, with guilt and a sense of failure lurking beneath surface jollity ...”

“... feigning’ of art. Again it depends who is doing it, and how good they are. Craig Raine and Christopher Reid are very good indeed, word processors as sensitive as Heaney. Far from being gimmicky, as its detractors imply, this poetry is always extremely clear and direct, and capable at its best of a wide variety of effect. One of the most impressive ...”

“... A good lad, Christopher, a tad pensive, or watchful, for one so young.A bookworm too, if ever there was one: perhaps a career in lawor some sort of scholarly pursuit or other, but surely a hopeless fitfor the give and take of Fleet Street or the City or as an estate agent.Still, a well-behaved and temperate child, pleasant enough company,but just this very moment struggling, and failing, to squelch a giggle10,000 feet above the Persian Gulf in one of only eleven seatson a de Havilland 104 Dove, which will presently be passingover the rocky terrain, salt pans and limestone formations of Qatar,beginning its descent only fifteen minutes after having taken off,the hydraulic whine of the landing gear making ready to extend ...”

“... he and some of his colleagues have developed on the characteristics of books they haven’t read. Christopher Booker did a rather similar job, informing us that ‘I have never read The Road to Oxiana,’ and then telling us his opinion of it, in a recent review of Paul Fussell’s Abroad.By an amiable irony, the same issue of the Spectator which contains ...”

“... to Broadlands, where Molly was giving a dance, and then motored to Cowes with Bobbie Cunningham-Reid, Conservative Member of Parliament for Warrington and Wilfred’s Parliamentary Private Secretary. Edwina ate ices and danced with Paul Hammond, who had come over from America in the Marconi yacht, Elettra.’ ‘Nina, what a lot of parties.’ But how too ...”

“... us believe that the sentimentalities of A.A. Milne, so greatly in evidence throughout the Pooh and Christopher Robin saga, are never very far removed in spirit from an adult mockery of the whole business of childhood. Milne, he says, is simultaneously sentimentalist and scoffer, and his own undercover approach makes parodies of his style redundant. (Parodists ...”

“... include ‘The Child Alone’, which deals with the autobiographies of W.H. Hudson, Forrest Reid, Eleanor Farjeon, Christopher Milne and Lord Berners, and ‘The Child at Home’, discussing Victor Gollancz, Augustus Hare, Stephen Spender, Winifred Foley and Neville Cardus. These categories are speculative instruments ...”

“... however, professors of literature who think we should rather go along with or encourage change. Christopher Ricks writes on clichés, contesting the common view that their prevalence is a sign of decadence: since we can’t beat them, he says, we ought to join them, or rather change them and use them in surprising ways, like the poets Geoffrey Hill and Bob ...”