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“... read Dryden’s Mac Flecknoe (1682), with its delicate possible parallel between the dunce writer Richard Flecknoe and Charles II, but not Nero the Second. Charles can’t be twinned with Flecknoe as straightforwardly as George I with Nero but, as Keymer shows, it’s the non-straightforwardness of the parallel – the way it’s built up from detail to ...”

“... of the decade. What he means is that he and his fellow-toilers in the biographical olive grove have been racing to make sense of the great heap of myth, obfuscation, blarney and coded revelation dumped on them in Olivier’s Confessions of an Actor. Far from settling questions about himself, it raised them like flies. Perhaps it meant to. Had Olivier ...”

“... no one would be terribly worried, not even the folks at the Trilateral Commission or the Bohemian Grove Club or the Hoover Institution. Barack Obama is sensible, cautious and tractable. Talented, sensible, cautious, tractable African-Americans can do well among the political elites in this country: ask Colin Powell or Condoleezza Rice. But in any case Hillary ...”

“... His vast apartment, at the very top of the wind-bruised, screeching tower, includes an olive grove 160 metres above ground. The Royal Geographical Society’s PR boasts that ‘on clear days it’s visible from ten counties, while apartments inside offer views over the Pennines, Peak District and Snowdonia.’ They also offer views of miles of ...”

“... of essays derived from Frazer, George Watson quotes the following passage: In this sacred grove mere grew a certain tree round which ... a grim figure might be seen to prowl ... He was a priest and a murderer: and the man for whom he was looking was sooner or later to murder him and hold the priesthood in his stead. Such was the rule of the ...”

“... trust in the triumph of poetry, imagination, the free word, over terror and oppression’, as Richard Pevear says in his Introduction to the Penguin text? Both critics go on to say that Bulgakov knew that manuscripts do burn, since he had burned some of his own. But surely the splendour and bravura of the line rely not on the actual combustibility (or ...”

“... transport network, through investment in the building and improvements programme. The Ladbroke Grove train crash may have led the Government to drop Railtrack as a definite partner in the project, but it has done nothing to dampen their longterm enthusiasm for the scheme.The majority of PPP’s opponents, including Livingstone and the Liberal Democrat ...”

“... is to weave through place and time with a guide as robust and detailed in his knowledge as, say, Richard Cobb is about France, albeit with diametrically opposite political analysis and enthusiasms. As a pamphleteer and radical, Davis is still very much on active service, though, as he remarked not so long ago, the programme of a radical in Los Angeles today ...”

“... in which ‘Birds thir quire apply; aires, vernal aires,/Breathing the smell of field and grove, attune/The trembling leaves,’ are intimately connected to the artful manipulations of the senses by late 17th-century gardeners. Although gardening between 1500 and 1700 might have aimed to create the appearance of paradisal simplicity, it was ...”

“... pockets.When a couple of art sympathisers drifted in, they were sent off to a filling station on Grove Road to find coins. Back in the Sunday spread of Victoria Park, the original people’s park, where multicultural street fare – Afghan Street Food, Mother Flipper Burgers, Japanese Street Food, Philly Cheesesteaks, Souvlaki and Chips – is on ...”

“... The answer is that it is an inept rendering of the sexual term jouissance in the translation by Richard Miller in which Anglophone readers regularly misread Barthes’s Plaisir du Texte, though it’s true that no single English word gives the full sense of ‘active pleasure’, with specific associations of orgasm, of Barthes’s usage. Barthes isn’t ...”

“... Reformed, but Ellis’s next screenplay credit was on a teen movie called The Curse of Downers Grove, which has a Rotten Tomatoes score of 15 per cent – not good. Talking is easier than writing, no matter how fluently the hackwork flows, and in 2013, Ellis began hosting a podcast. In 2019, nearly everyone with a smidge of name recognition and a working ...”

“... might be better applied to Carl Orff, who accepted a Nazi commission (turned down by Richard Strauss, Hans Pfitzner and Werner Egk) to replace the much-loved incidental music for A Midsummer Night’s Dream. His alternative to what he called Mendelssohn’s ‘moonlight with sugar water’ was due to be premiered in a Frankfurt opera house when ...”

“... hasn’t bothered to examine, shows that his father, William Robert Archer, lived at 48 Highbury Grove, then a North London boarding-house owed by one Mrs Rhoda Bowness. His occupation is given as ‘journalist’. The mother, Lola Howard Archer, lived separately over the Thames at a now-vanished address in Southwark – 18 Nelson Square – which was bombed ...”

“... ideas they’re objecting to as much as the words. That was certainly the case in the furore over Richard Eyre’s film version of Harrison’s poem V. when it was shown on Channel Four with none of its expletives deleted.* Campaigners against the film claimed to be horrified by its vulgar tongue but the vulgarity of the author’s origins and politics were ...”