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“... to know what to think (the pun on ‘solution’ is Berlin’s kind of joke). Committed to what John Gray has called ‘agonistic liberalism’, to the irresolvably competing claims made on and by post-Enlightenment individuals, Berlin was as keen on refuges from conflict as on conflict itself; more excited by academic appointments in Oxford than by ...”

“... how right any sane person is to get out and stay out: ‘There is no special loveliness in that gray country, with its rainy, sea-beat archipelago; its fields of dark mountains; its unsightly places, black with coal; its treeless, sour, unfriendly-looking cornlands; its quaint, gray, castled city, where the bells clash of ...”

“... for ‘this prosperous decade between two disastrous economic depressions’ (as Alasdair Gray recalls it in The Fall of Kelvin Walker, subtitled ‘A Fable of the Sixties’). It occurs to John Dyson, Frayn’s downtrodden hero, that ‘failure was the secular equivalent of sin.’ But even his failure now seems ...”

“... is a bust of Beethoven and a photograph of Lenin; magazines with the faces of Marilyn Monroe and John Lennon; small vases of dead flowers and strings of gleaming beads; a tiny Jesus and Virgin Mary, bathed in blue light; and the nonpareil marker of 1970s low-cost luxury, a Black Magic chocolate box.Bedsit aftermath, campy museum ...”

“... however, suggests that Alice must have been quite aware of William’s feeling for Minny. In 1913, John Gray, then dean of Harvard Law School and another of the men who had once been in love with Minny, gave his share of her correspondence to Alice for safekeeping; and it was Alice who in turn sent the letters on to Henry for the second volume of his ...”

“... apparent timelessness, and depends on the reassurance of anachronism for its populist impact. When Gray observed that ‘the language of the age is never the language of poetry’ he was noting something that the common reader usually takes for granted. Tennyson achieved wide popularity by making poetry sound old-fashioned in a new way. The idiom of The ...”

“... Alasdair Gray has opened his Book of Prefaces with what he calls an Advertisement and followed that with an essay ‘On What Led to English Literature’. Since he deliberately does not distinguish between the various sorts of front matter a volume may contain, both might be characterised as prefaces. I encountered this laxity with some dismay, although I understand it ...”

“... as a mere imitator. Richard Dana thought his ‘Marco Bozzaris’ was America’s best lyric poem. John Quincy Adams referred to one of his poems in a speech to the House of Representatives in 1836. Most inexplicable of all, on 15 May 1877, fifty thousand people gathered in Central Park to see President Hayes unveil a statue of Halleck in the so-called ...”

“... darkness, a murmuring, perfervid sadhu close at hand. Turbidity, gases, a silky clouding over – gray slime spreads across hot dog casings, a sour reechiness transpires below. However much by day we shore up our defenses, darling, over time they find their way back to slowly assail our dwindling larder. Liquefaction, spoilage and rot – mephitic flora breed ...”

“... that the tracker had not been issued by the police but was the personal property of a GTTF cop, John Clewell, they contacted the FBI. It turned out that another officer in the unit lived next door to Anderson. What if the police had broken into Anderson’s flat? ‘I wasn’t even believing it as I was saying it,’ one of the drug detectives said. Leads ...”

“... With the initial support of small publishers such as Polygon and Canongate, writers like Alasdair Gray, Agnes Owens, Thomas Healy, Tom Leonard, James Kelman and Janice Galloway have found the city a congenial location for their life and work, and their success is encouraging others. Of course, Glasgow has always had its writers. Torrington’s late Sixties ...”

“... congregation were in tears.’ When he had become a celebrity, men as notoriously irreligious as John Wilkes and David Hume attended church services to hear him preach. ‘Tristram pleads his cause well, tho’ he does not believe one word of it,’ Wilkes noted with satisfaction. Reading his sermons, Thomas Gray thought ...”

“... this country. His notions about its burial customs drew heavily on Young’s Night Thoughts and Gray’s Elegy, poems then honoured in Italy. That Foscolo himself should end up in an English churchyard would have seemed absurd in 1807. Yet the seed that led him to an impoverished death in Chiswick had already germinated. Foscolo was always something of an ...”

“... Le Guin set the action of her novel on a planet where perpetual winter provides an appropriately gray and colourless backdrop. But even she could not quite sustain the imaginative leap required: once a month her characters acquire sexual characteristics, but at random – an individual may be male one month and female the next. Why do we have sex at ...”

“... indefinitely, and by the 1920s her appearance had altered, and shocked. ‘Her wind-blown gray hair, her startled gray eyes, her thin white face, belonged to a reluctant visitor from another world, frightened at what she had undergone in this one.’ The biographer has not so much to reconstruct her life as to ...”