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“... of having their knees nailed to the furniture. The fallen state of Private Eye is illustrated by Peter McKay’s foolish and ill-written book, Inside Private Eye, but scornful young readers should remember that this downmarket old fogey was once a young fogey. It stood up to the Krays, a plucky little public-school rag-mag. This brings us back to The Old ...”

“... and made him welcome. We all do that, all the colony over.’ It is in pursuit of such myths that Peter Carey’s Oscar and Lucinda set out for the promised land; they learn the realities of life in the colony the hard way. Carey set himself against Dickens more explicitly nine years later, in Jack Maggs (1997), an imaginative reworking of Great ...”

“... impressed by the much older William Burroughs; a year later he encountered Jack Kerouac. He read Hart Crane, adopting and adapting the passion for rhetoric, but ignoring Crane’s attempt to comprehend the culture of the past in a vision of contemporary America. He ignored also Crane’s metrical strictness, and under the influence of William Carlos Williams ...”

“... is a transsexual, but the suggestion is that she wants to conform to society and can’t, just as Peter Pan, as Barrie finally admitted to himself, wanted to grow up, but couldn’t. Women are treated in The Well without much sympathy, and almost always as empty-headed. The whole book supports the view that men are naturally superior, which is why Stephen ...”

“... intuitive powers of response. The pleasures of early reading – Bloom says in Agon (1982) that Hart Crane ‘cathected’ him ‘onto poetry’ when he was ten years old – must grow more remote with every return to the text. Crane’s ‘Marlovian rhetoric swept us in,’ Bloom recalls, ‘but as with Marlowe himself the rhetoric was also a psychology ...”

“... is free, but facts are sacred.’ By such lofty standards even the Guardian of Peter Preston falls short. Its reporters are men and women with opinions that shine out from its pages. Even if they start their careers with the news, they are hoping for preferment to the editorial pages. With luck, long service and a reputation for ...”

“... deal, shares rose again to £4.50 each; Edwards sold £3.7 million shares, making £16.6 million. Peter Reid, the ex-Everton midfielder and manager – and as Sunderland manager, the subject of the BBC fly-on-the-wall docu-tragedy of the club’s relegation, Premier Passions – stands to make hundreds of thousands of pounds should he wish to cash in on his ...”

“... field of Pop. Let it be better made, as lyrics and music were in the days of Cole Porter, Lorenz Hart and Ira Gershwin, is his belief. This is an important aspect of his drive into popular culture: not just to enjoy the warmth of a wider appreciation and so avoid the inward-looking aridity of much experimental art, but to join in with and even improve on a ...”

“... Lord Byron’), ‘Paul’s Tattoo’ (alluding to ‘Tattoos’ in James Merrill’s sequence ‘Peter’), ‘An Island Sheaf’ (alluding to Hart Crane’s Key West: An Island Sheaf), ‘Summer Landscape’, ‘Lily and Bronze’, ‘After the Fourth’, ‘American Sublime’ (alluding to Stevens’s ‘The American ...”

“... is: who reads these books and what purpose do they serve? I can imagine looking up a name in James Hart’s fifth edition of The Oxford Companion to American Literature. Updated to include ‘authors not yet born when this book was first begun’, it offers abbreviated commentaries on such newly arrived figures on the scene as Diane Wakoski (1937-; cited here ...”

“... his excellent introduction to the poem, published for the first time in 2015 by the Perdika Press, Peter Robinson suggests that to issue such a piece in the homophobic 1950s might well have proved ‘controversial’. The homoerotic charge Ashbery detected in Prince’s early poems is often what makes their Yeatsian rhetoric suddenly catch fire, driving the ...”

“... 4 January. A Christmas letter from Cami Elbow, wife of Peter Elbow, an American college friend who teaches English at Amherst: Life in Amherst is very placid. Even grammatically correct. In December the town decided to encourage shoppers to patronise the downtown stores with free parking. They ordered plastic bags to cover up the parking meters but the bags arrived with the message wrongly punctuated: ‘Season’s Greeting’s ...”

“... fire from heauen, to animate His worke, for which he was by loue depriued Of life him selfe, and hart-strings of an Ægle riued. The creation of a new lifeform by the assembling and uniting of disjunctive body-parts from different beasts looks forward to the ill-fated scientific experiment undertaken by ‘the modern Prometheus’, as the subtitle of the ...”

“... a decent public school and one of the older Oxbridge colleges tend to instil in a chap. Anyway, as Peter Conrad reasonably suggested in reply, you could just as well characterise academics by their neurotic maladjustment and social dysfunction as by their braying voices and lofty disregard for the human reality of the head porter.The awful dons in that essay ...”

“... and told the story of the Jewish people from antiquity to the present. It was directed by Moss Hart, with a score by Kurt Weill, and had a choir of fifty rabbis, plus a cast of nearly five hundred, including the young Frank Sinatra. Huge audiences went to see it in New York, Philadelphia, Boston, Chicago and the Hollywood Bowl. In Washington it was seen by ...”