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“... slavers, the Liverpool rebels in the age of affluence took from the black musicians of proletarian North America exactly those songs which, under nonsense codicils like ‘Be Bop a Lula’ or ‘Bonie Maronie’, most urgently reflected the rhythmic intensity and emotional drama of the music of Africa. In a curious way, the experience of belonging to a ...”

“... a version of Manzoni’s The Betrothed by de Sade – and the itinerary is eclectic: Ariosto, Marianne Moore, Fourier, Northrop Frye, Stendahl and Cyrano de Bergerac (the author, not the play). But despite the occasional nature of the items the only one that disappoints is an autobiographical fragment. Calvino stutters when asked to talk about ...”

“... authorities realised he was more than a transient figure when he started bringing students along. Marianne Early, for example, joined him in 1984 to gather maggots from the 19-day-old corpse of a murdered woman found close to Pearl Harbor. Early, Goff writes with a certain pedagogic affection, ‘had been conducting decomposition studies on pig and cat ...”

“... not out of desperation but simply to do better – to get higher wages and early promotions in North America, Australia, New Zealand and South Africa. But the effect by the mid-20th century was clear enough. Edwin Muir, writing in 1935, saw a country ‘gradually being emptied of its population, its spirit, its wealth, industry, art, intellect and innate ...”

“... ready to ask a question. ‘Fifteen years ago,’ he wrote in 1966, ‘the English hardly credited North America with having any poetry at all; but they are now, it turns out, ready to accept all and any American poetry.’ In an interview, published at the end of Shelf Life, his latest collection of essays and criticism, he mentions that ‘the ...”

“... France; De Gaulle was not invited to Washington a few months later for discussions of the pending North African campaign, or later to Tehran to discuss the Allied invasion plans for Europe, or eventually to Yalta and Potsdam. There had been tensions enough with the British, whose bludgeoning decorum is elegantly caught in L’Appel, his first volume of ...”

“... door that slams. Six months later he was dead – hit by a car when out walking, after dark, on a North Carolina highway. Accident or suicide? On this question there is still much argument, and the evidence is inconclusive. It is generally agreed, though, by his friends that in the past two years or so (Jarrell turned 50 in 1964) this imperiously vital ...”

“... contributors to Poems of Science are Dorothy Donnelly, examining a pin under a microscope, and Marianne Moore, whose ‘Four Quartz Crystal Clocks’, taking as its setting the US Naval Observatory and Bell Telephone Laboratory Time Vault, is a plea for punctuality and punctiliousness:     The lemur-student can see       that an aye-aye is not ...”

“... young Jewish men and women to join its ranks. In November 1942, after the Allied campaign began in North Africa, the Germans brusquely shoved the Vichy regime aside and occupied southern France, sweeping away the dilemmas of pro-Vichy resisters in the process. More important to the growth of the Resistance than any of this, however, were more general factors ...”

“... further on – where the bait, fish for bait, was trapped – (this is trivial, I know, and like Marianne [Moore], sometimes I think I’m telling the truth when I’m not) … ‘The sea drenched the rock’ is so perfectly simple and so good. Lowell replied: ‘Your suggestions on “Water” might be great improvements.’ The poem finally read: It was ...”

“... side, they were all Jewish. Zalman and Sofya Akselrod, the most religious, lived in a shtetl in north-west Russia, Zalman selling soap and ice cream. Vladimir Gurevich came from Kherson, on the Black Sea coast, where his father owned a factory producing agricultural machinery before he was possibly killed in pogroms after the revolution. Vladimir died in ...”

“... of ATV’s Escape into Night (1972). In this faithful adaptation of Catherine Storr’s novel Marianne Dreams, a young boy convalesces in a forbidding old house which is gradually surrounded by gigantic rocks, each equipped with a single luminous red eye, which close in on him as his illness progresses. The series went out at teatime on ITV but was more ...”

“... of controlled panic’). Privation fuels the eye’s predations, and when Joseph Summers described Marianne Moore’s meticulous attention as a ‘method of escaping intolerable pain’, Bishop wrote to him to say that she was just beginning to realise this about herself. Yet while the cultivation of impressions might be an enabling form of repression, to be ...”

“... about poets – Yeats, Hughes, Frost, Bishop, Dickinson, Stevie Smith, Lowell, Montale, Pessoa, Marianne Moore, H.D., Tsvetaeva, Arnold, Auden, Graves, Heaney, Day-Lewis – whose idiom is peculiarly distinctive (Day-Lewis being the possible exception, but Muldoon, characteristically tricky, chooses to write about a poor poem by him called ‘A ...”

“... the time, as Borges reminds us in a marvellous essay on FitzGerald, when ‘on an island to the north and west that is unknown to the cartographers of Islam, a Saxon king who defeated a king of Norway is defeated by a Norman duke.’ Khayyám’s work on cubic equations remains fundamental. It seems it was a sideline, versifying. Composing quatrains was a ...”