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“... that survives precious. Some of the best medieval poems – Beowulf, Pearl, Sir Gawain and the Green Knight – have come down to us in a single manuscript. Four books contain about two-thirds of all surviving Old English poetry, and for a few months in 2018 those four lay side by side in a single (doubtless heavily insured) glass case for an exhibition at ...”

“... rain as ‘grief in arrears’ is the loveliest thing in the book), or the compact subtleties of Robert Crawford, whose short poem ‘Scotland’ is infinitely more subtle and political than the work of Didsbury and McMillan or even Peter Reading. And then the sweet, rapid brocade of Glyn Maxwell’s complex forms, or the grace of Pauline Stainer. These ...”

“... present lexicographer, so it can acquire new writers, compilers, continuers.’ In a US review, Robert Coover suggested that computer hackers might make Dictionary of the Khazars their own as a prototype hypertext, unpaginated, non-sequential, that can be entered anywhere by anybody. This looks forward to a utopian, high-tech version of the oral tradition ...”

“... role of physician, mixing and prescribing her own patent remedy, a concoction of boiled snails, green herbs and mutton fat. Relegated soon afterwards to the more humble role of gardener, she brought the same artful mimicry of idiom and manner to the part. ‘One day, upon my mother’s paying me a visit in the garden and approving something I had done ...”

“... outside ourselves of all that is bad in the world and in us. In The Man Without Qualities, Robert Musil called this process the making of ‘displeasure-images’, and identified it as ‘part of the oldest psychotechnical apparatus mankind possesses’. Together with our tendency to take things figuratively, this is the mechanism which complies with ...”

“... to those to whom the title suggests something as repugnantly exotic as raw ink-fish swallowed with green mustard. I myself find the idealisation of michi (Way) one of the few attitudes to life that redeem our fiercely competitive and achievement-hungry national character. The ideal of a single pursuit, based on the Zen belief that one is many and many are ...”

“... not much concerned when son is busted from school for doing the same. In the Seventies, becomes a Green, goes to encounter groups and founds a commune, but living off the land proves less attractive to communards than meditation. He meditates too, and finds God: naturally not the God of any recognised religion, but a bloody-minded God who makes him strike the ...”

“... purposes. Still, many a Senior Fellow must have wept to see his college grounds diminished, its green reduced, for the sake of demonstrating that Trinity was indeed an Irish university. But it must be acknowledged that Trinity has made these important changes with every show of good will. Indeed, so far as the question of public relations arises, Trinity ...”

“... or daylight description soaks on to the paper easily enough. But down here, in silver-green East Anglia, I am indolentminded, and the mapping out of my delicious colloquies with Edmund seems to be continually postponed.’ He seems to have been very sensitive to the atmosphere in which he wrote: whether this is a virtue in a diarist or a mark of ...”

“... to dwell on the mixture of manners, the ‘tension between the styles’. Everett suggests that Robert Hitchens’s Bella Donna, a bestseller which figures in the Thompson-Bywaters case of 1922 – a fine English murder – was one of Eliot’s sources, and that he had been reading Gentlemen prefer blondes and Ring Lardner, here described with some ...”

“... averages that linked weather to climate could be calculated. Some scientists, such as Harvard’s Robert DeCourcy Ward, who in 1910 became the first professor of climatology in the US, disdained all proxies, insisting that instrumental measurements were the only reliable indices for the modelling of climates past and present. But some believed they had ...”

“... the material that came out of Wales and Ireland, farms and fishing, men’s work with horses. Like Robert Roberts, another recorder of the lives of the poor born at the end of the last century, Evans grew up in a grocer’s shop – not in the classic slum of Salford, but in the mining valley of Abercynon. The children of shopkeepers in poor working-class ...”

“... inhabitants of Central and Eastern Europe, caricatured in this account with ‘squiggly’ pipes, green velvet frog buttons, leather trousers, jaunty orchestras, country dancing and garden gnomes – by the end of his stay, Cobb found even Viennese clothes-lines ‘frightening’ on account of the long white socks hanging from them. A postwar chapter recounts ...”

“... with gold and silver crosses, by soldiers of a British expeditionary force in 1868, after Sir Robert Napier’s defeat of King Tewodros, who had spent many years collecting them. They are now in the possession of the British Library and the Queen, among others, and there are no plans to return them. Lalibela was named after a man born in the 12th century ...”

“... in their homeland. One of the lawyers for the Red Army Faction (the Baader-Meinhof gang) is now a Green member of the German parliament, another is the notably illiberal interior minister, a third is Gerhard Schroeder. (In the 1970s, Schroeder defended Horst Mahler, who had himself acted for RAF members and is now a supporter of the far right NDP.) Ulrike ...”