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“... because he delighted in it, was equal to its rigours, and craved to understand its least leaf and crystal, swarming up its pines in gales of wind and leaning out over the lips of its waterfalls. His feeling for nature is scarcely separable from his piety, which is luxuriant and ecstatic. In the Californian Sierra, ‘the presence of an atmosphere is hardly ...”

“... Thames-side quay (which looks like something out of Cleopatra); and a scheme for standing the Crystal Palace on its end as a 1,000-foot-high memorial to Albert (the ‘Towering Inferno’ before its time). For foolishness, there is a monument to Nelson in the form of an 89-foot-high trident (described by one contemporary as ‘a gigantic toasting ...”

“... sides like hardened water and a “content” immersed in a larger container of flowing liquid crystal’. There is as much Proust as Dante in the virtuality produced by Pound’s gaze down into the sea from the cliffs at Sant’ Ambrogio: Lay in soft grass by the cliff’s edge with the sea 30 metres below this and at hand’s span, at cubit’s reach ...”

“... Rosenblum with ‘the immediate illusion of a theatrical tableau enacted by costumed players in a crystal-clear space’. It was painted for – one might say took place at – the Salon of 1834. By then many paintings were designed primarily for the great annual public exhibitions and some of them exclusively for these, with no appropriate final ...”

“... and moving, but symbolic of a whole order of events, a fundamental shift in social values. David Leavitt has praised the book for this ‘historical largeness’, for telling ‘the story of the Seventies and Eighties in America’: the story, in other words, of the unmaking of the traditional family, with its gender and generational roles, its ...”

“... people trying to ‘adopt’ Coe. Television viewers can see the process at work in the person of David Coleman, who maintains, on camera, what comes across as a flirtatiously bantering relationship with ‘Seb’. Coe may be inured to it by now, but as his book records, he has been embarrassed in the past: ‘To cap it all, [Frank] Bough had signed off the ...”

“... deserved a Pulitzer many times over for his first two collections, Freely Espousing (1969) and The Crystal Lithium (1972), but the collection with the Auden elegy in it isn’t much good. The years of Milltown, Nembutal, Thorazine, lithium and the rest had coarsened Schuyler’s matchlessly delicate touch. Schuyler wasn’t too keen on Auden’s later ...”

“... for the mass of a stalactite, or makes it possible (via complex number systems) to explain the crystal formation of ice. Walking the frozen wastes around her native Thule from a young age, Smilla has developed an uncanny sense of direction that enables her to find her way in the worst blizzard. This special gift is reinforced by an unusually comprehensive ...”

“... with it, as he suggests in the account of a primal scene he gave in an interview with David Sylvester: Childhood’s important to me, and it’s when I first came into contact with art. This happened when I was around four or five. One of the greatest pleasures I remember is looking at a cereal box. It’s a kind of sexual experience at that age ...”

“... believable 14 seasons. In 1991 the club had to move to Selhurst Park and share a ground with Crystal Palace, once it became clear that Plough Lane could not be adapted into the sort of all-seater stadium required in the aftermath of the Hillsborough disaster. A year later the First Division turned into the Premier League and the money really started to ...”

“... a leisurely luxury, and early writing about the epidemic was raw testimony, often from people like David Wojnarowicz who knew they didn’t have the time for subtlety, fighting rhetoric with rhetoric by diagnosing a disease whose symptoms were ‘sweating palms, angry outbursts, hysteria, the discharging of handguns’.* Even journalism struggled to keep up ...”

“... Silence was his last double album: I wanna go out in the countryside Oh, sit by the clear cool crystal Water, get my spirit way back to the feeling Deep in my soul, I wanna feel Oh so close to the One, close to the One, Close to the One, close to the One And that’s why I keep on singin’ baby My hymns to the silence ... No one who knows the poems of ...”

“... activity; and his most recent full-length opera, Gawain, has an ambitious verse libretto by David Harsent. Ted Hughes once wrote a libretto for Gordon Crosse. The Story of Vasco, whose subject-matter involves crows, is an interesting opera by a composer who has now, regrettably, stopped composing. The poet John Birtwhistle supplied ...”

“... In the Thirties and early Forties the English poet David Gascoyne was much enamoured of the Continental, Late Romantic image of writing and of the writer as a visionary misfit. By the end of the Thirties, his place in the great Euro-Visionary Song Contest was almost secured. He confessed his ambition in his Journals in 1938: Want to write an essay on ‘The Apotheosis of Lautréamont ...”

“... a sane and rational position during a paranoid phase in the relations between East and West. It is crystal clear from Michael Howard’s writings that he was never, in Mrs Thatcher’s phrase, ‘one of us’. Like many other dons and civil servants who began their careers during the Second World War, he believes in a nation beyond party which it is the duty ...”