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“... enjoyment and the central means to political understanding and intervention. Peter Brook once said he himself had no sense of history as a reality: ‘History to me is a way of looking at things, and-not one that interests me very much’; the artist’s vision is concerned with the present. This view, whatever may be said for it, is very ...”

“... had himself entertained for a time thoughts of a similar long poem (his was to be called ‘The Brook’), which would have interwoven natural description and metaphysical reflections. Like many of Coleridge’s grandest schemes it came to nothing; but in Wordsworth, he clearly felt, he had found just the man to take over the testing commission. However ...”

“... a bit like contemplating Ophelia’s soaking garments and weedy trophies pulled from the weeping brook; they are cold, modern remnants of desire and the misfortunes of fortune; tokens of the 20th century’s obsession with the nuances of fame and public death. Madame Bovary. The Sun Also Rises. The Unnamable. The Fall. Marilyn’s auctioned books are like ...”

“... officials to be arrested were Richard Trunkfield, a prison officer who had sold details about James Bulger’s killer Jon Venables; Alan Tierney, a Surrey police constable who was paid £1250 for passing information that John Terry’s mother had been cautioned for shoplifting, and Ronnie Wood for assaulting his girlfriend; and Tracy Bell, a pharmacy ...”

“... and Cliff Richard. ‘Here they come,’ the BBC said. ‘Oh, they look a bit awkward,’ said James Whitaker, Royal Expert. ‘Oh well. Never mind. She’s finally got him in her grip.’ ‘I don’t think I am wallowing in exuberant excitement,’ said Piers Morgan, former editor of the Daily Mirror. ‘I think there will be a sigh of relief among the ...”

“... Homer and Virgil and Chaucer accompanied Stendhal and Jane Austen, Dickens and Tolstoy and Henry James; and near the end was one poem that certainly might, in its intensity, be described as ‘short’ – Coleridge’s Rime of the Ancient Mariner. This almost token poem, a magnificent simple affair that most of us did at school, is the world’s most ...”

“... savage torrents. The major obstacle between these suddenly angry watercourses – the Carrant Brook, the Tirlebrook, the Little Fid and the Swilgate – and the two big rivers of the valley was the town of Tewkesbury, its ten thousand inhabitants and the Mythe waterworks. Gloucestershire’s public servants – the councils, the health service, the police ...”

“... out of it, or the title of the second anyway. Finn. Finnegan. It was here on 10 June 1904 that James Joyce met Nora Barnacle, who worked in the hotel. The two young strangers who had locked eyes stopped to talk, and they arranged to meet four days later outside the house where Sir William Wilde, eye surgeon to the queen in Ireland, if she should have ever ...”

“... every bush and tree, and levelled every hill And hung the moles for traitors – though the brook is running still, It runs a naked stream, cold and chill. ‘Remembrances’ is printed without punctuation in the six-volume Oxford edition, as are all the other poems, but Bate adopts light punctuation where the sense requires ‘some form of ...”

“... Manley Hopkins and John Millington Synge, whose work he would defend vehemently; he met the young James Joyce, who declared him ‘very loquacious’. If Yeats liked someone, he made a sketch of them or even a portrait. He was not too bothered if they did not pay. ‘I painted for nothing when I could not get the money,’ he said years later. ‘In Dublin ...”

“... John Day for ‘permitting a person to handle [his] private parts naked’. In 1835 John Smith and James Pratt were spied through a keyhole having sex in a room in a lodging house on Blackfriars Road. ‘The detection of these degraded creatures was owing entirely to their poverty,’ the magistrate admitted. ‘They were unable to pay for privacy, and the ...”