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“... On 18 July​ 2003, the body of the weapons inspector David Kelly was found in the woods on Harrowdown Hill in Oxfordshire, two months after he’d revealed that the Blair administration had exaggerated the threat posed by Saddam Hussein. Rachel Wells, the central character in Number 11 and the narrator of the first of its five overlapping stories, was ten when Kelly’s body was discovered ...”

“... word ‘write’ in the Old English writan, to ‘scratch’ or ‘score’. In those same years Hopkins was minting words like ‘bone-house’, ‘yestertempest’, ‘leaf-light’, ‘knee-nave’, ‘shadowtackle’, ‘trambeams’, because the stuff of life sank into him so deeply that to express its being he had to fuse one thing with another. The ...”

“... there a single memorable aperçu in all his letters? The contrast with Gray, or Keats, or even Hopkins, is glaring.’ Ignoring Pope’s outsider status, a product of his Roman Catholic faith and his physical handicap, some self-proclaimed New Historicists have slandered him as an apologist for such establishment vices as colonialism, which he explicitly ...”

“... could invite to his study for extra-curricular supervision. After reading this book, I telephoned David Blackie, who now runs a computer language course in Bedfordshire, and who was unlucky enough to be patronised by Trench at Bradfield in the early Sixties. Blackie is quoted by Peel as criticising Trench’s ‘penchant for unrestricted and unsupervised ...”

“... world’s population that doesn’t live in Cheam. This paper wasn’t invented by Dacre but by David English, variously described as the best editor on Fleet Street and the biggest liar since Herodotus. (English once invented a whole interview with Betty Ford and on another occasion pretended to have been in Dallas the day Kennedy was shot.) By the end of ...”

“... and commerce has haunted many conservative writers. Paulin includes Jonson, Dryden, Pope, Swift, Hopkins, Yeats and Eliot in this tradition. Here again, though, there are complications. Since 1688, England has almost without exception been blessed with monarchs who remain magnificently intractable to the imagination (and in this respect the future seems ...”

“... comprehensive. There are bound to be reservations about the use of the venerable Phelps Brown and Hopkins index of real wages as a reliable guide to the standard of living which is such a central concept for their argument, and it is a source of regret, especially from the late 18th century onwards, when the experience of economic growth was so diverse and ...”

“... material for such distinguished hams as Jason Robards, Rip Torn, Philip Baker Hall and Anthony Hopkins. Feeney contends that Nixon had a unique capacity among US presidents for constructing narratives around himself. He renames Nixon’s memoir, Six Crises, ‘Six Star Turns’, and notes that its subject ‘presents himself throughout as if he were an ...”

“... child growing up in Brooklyn and the Lower East Side a few years before the First World War. David Schearl, the protagonist, lives in terror of his father, an implacably resentful man called Albert, who boils with rage every evening while recounting real or imagined workplace slights: ‘They look at me crookedly, with mockery in their eyes! How much can ...”

“... not to understand. Patterns recur: ‘the land it is practised on’ fits a metrical formula Hopkins discovered in Shakespeare – he called it an ‘outriding foot’ – which he underlined whenever he found it; he liked strong caesuras, and believed that the two final (unstressed) syllables enforced a powerful emphasis on the previous one. Marcus’s ...”

“... In a famous poem by Hopkins, a child called Margaret is rebuked for grieving over the fall of leaves. Leaves fall; stuff happens; we get over it; or, to stay with Hopkins’s idiom, the heart ‘will come to such sights colder/By and by’. The child will one day find better reasons for her tears, including the fate of humankind, falling and falling again since its first lapse in Eden: ‘You will weep and know why ...”

“... thought otherwise. Claims that X or Y are Christian writers are always more or less absurd. Hopkins said, ‘Christ is your only literary critic,’ and it may be added that He does not run a book club. But Lewis certainly achieved the distinction of being represented, on an upper floor of Wheaton College, Illinois – Billy Graham’s old college ...”

“... a pride of publishers, producers, stars and ancient European aristocrats – something like the David Frost Show done by Visconti. Everyone is beautiful except the gossip columnists, and they have all the appropriate faults, from kinky tastes in sex to bad spelling and worse usage: ‘But the daisy chain ... was only just gathering speed. It was still a ...”

“... thoroughly sardonic about it at the same time (‘a poetic gift,’ he once said in an essay about Hopkins, ‘is always inordinate in its demands’). His ‘quasi-telegraphese’ style leaves out words which grammar normally requires, such as pronouns and articles, and omits too the fuller information or explanation that you might expect in a more ...”

“... certainly exploited by Mackay Brown. The fact that he was at one stage a student of Gerard Manley Hopkins is no doubt apparent in his tendency to coin new adjectival nuances through hyphenation: ‘the hawk-neighboured sun’ precedes by only a few lines ‘the buttercup-gentle and maggot-humming wind’. And indeed, in his use of almost obsolete words for ...”