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“... Geoffrey Hill the poet is often washing his hands. Sensuous but deeply penitential, his poetry visits waves of scruple upon itself. No contemporary poet has a more contrite ear for the confessions, and the betrayals, of words. Of course, much great poetry has not worn this bent gesture, nor do we always want it to, and it can be irritating when Hill’s more pious admirers speak as if verse’s highest theme should be not the intolerable wrestle with words, but, as it were, a further wrestle with the wrestle ...”

“... Paul Celan​ was born in 1920 and died in 1970. The symmetry of these dates, arranged around the end of the Second World War, seems cruelly freighted, as does the fact that Celan chose to end his life on Hitler’s birthday. Celan – he gave himself the name by inverting the order of the syllables of his original surname, Antschel – grew up in Czernowitz, then part of Romania, now part of Ukraine ...”

“... I am assuming,’ Paul Fussell said in Abroad: British Literary Travelling Between the Wars (1980), ‘that travel is now impossible and that tourism is all we have left.’ To be a traveller, you have to move about alone, eschew standard procedures, avoid the commonplace of maps, and hold yourself ready for adventure ...”

“... clumsily be called – is an interesting condition: there is something a little odd about seeing Paul McCartney’s brother being interviewed on TV and talking about Macca as ‘our kid’ (how many Beatles fans ever wondered if Paul McCartney had a brother?); and what about Terry Major-Ball. Not to mention Earl Spencer. I ...”

“... family living in Holland Park. But the great turning point came in 1909, when she married Paul Landemare.Landemare was a French chef and a widower with six children. He came from a family of Parisian pâtissiers: the Landemares were listed in the Annuaire-almanach du commerce in the 1880s as suppliers of a range of sweetened ...”

“... any significance, he said the inhabitants of a Catholic country – as I write the remains of John Paul II are doing the local rounds, Pátzcuaro this afternoon, Morelia this evening – should know the answer to the question, and then added a gloss to the effect that God took six days to make the mess we live in, and then had the gall to give himself a day ...”

“... dismayed to learn that we are so well into Post-Modernism that Neo-Modernism must be just over the hill. Indeed, according to Frank Kermode, we passed out of Palaeo-Modernism some time ago (imperceptibly, one presumes, as through the tail of a comet). He might, however, be consoled by the knowledge that artists themselves are confused, though themselves in ...”

“... by Bacon and Freud. Craxton still sits with John Minton, Michael Ayrton, Graham Sutherland and Paul Nash as a Neo-Romantic painter, part of the postwar reawakening of the national landscape tradition of Blake and Palmer. In 1987 an influential exhibition at the Barbican, A Paradise Lost: The Neo-Romantic Imagination in Britain 1935-55, reinforced the ...”

“... Thank you for keeping still,’ Elizabeth Taylor says to Paul Newman at the end of the movie version of Cat on a Hot Tin Roof (1958). Taylor’s character is thanking Newman for not saying anything when he hears her lying about being pregnant. But ‘Thank you for keeping still’ is also a good summary of Newman’s acting style, especially in his early films, when the main thing required of him was that he display his magnificent torso and his dazzling blue eyes for the audience to drink in their full manly beauty ...”

“... Paul Klee drew many different kinds of picture, and the exhibition on at the Hayward Gallery until 1 April, Paul Klee: The Nature of Creation, arranges them by kind rather than chronologically. The juxtapositions are both logical and illuminating. (‘Drew’ because in most of his work there is more drawing, or drawing and filling in, than painting ...”

“... much. As proof, he cites its adherence to an old tradition. On every 19th of April, the date of Paul Revere’s ride, the town’s great bell rings out and ‘the people of the town awaken suddenly in their beds, and listen, and remember.’ The bell was made by Paul Revere, and what they allegedly remember is the ...”

“... the realisation of which may be seen in A.L. Morton’s The World of the Ranters and Christopher Hill’s The World Turned Upside Down. At the same time, these and other historians wished to find precursors for the anti-hegemonic ‘hippy’ culture of the late 1960s, and Norman Cohn (whose membership of the CP Historians Group has gone unrecorded) wished to ...”

“... acquired a number of illustrious admirers – including those poetic polar opposites, Geoffrey Hill and John Ashbery – his poetry is still not widely known. ‘Soldiers Bathing’, it’s true, is likely to feature in any anthology or critical account of the poetry of the Second World War, and assiduous scholars of both ...”

“... episode, that works hardest to recover real events. The film takes its title from a Notting Hill restaurant, opened in 1968 by Frank Crichlow. The Mangrove became a centre of black activist and intellectual life – and a target of police aggression: it was raided a dozen times in less than two years. PC Frank Pulley claimed there were drugs on the ...”

“... the material for half a dozen novels into a single one of three or occasionally six hundred pages. Paul Bailey was the immaculate mistake of his title, born in Battersea in 1937, the third and unintended child of a roadsweeper and a domestic help. ‘Unintended’ hence a mistake, ‘immaculate’ because that was a word often on his mother’s lips. The ...”