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“... might just perhaps ensure that he won’t get lazily shelved down the cultural end, if any, of the self-help bay in the book stores, when what he has written is in no sense a bluffer’s guide, full of practical tips on how to stay afloat at the next bookish conversazione you get sucked into. Rather, he wants us to know that it doesn’t in actual fact matter ...”

“... print by jamming them together and running them into one another.’ Yet here is her Faber Book, a self-confessed anthology which, attempting to present 35 poets ‘whole’, aspires to be a collection of Collecteds. Probably we should leave the editor alone with her conscience and just be grateful to have the poems. But a hostile finger must be pointed at the ...”

“... mind is almost its own subject, where the place of narrative or character is mostly taken by the self-conscious or self-delighting mind, and where you yourself are put in mind of the quivery automatic graph-paper machines that register earthquakes or the humidity in museums (seismometers or hygrometers), is demanding to ...”

“... a jagged strip of canvas left bare at the top. It’s reminiscent of Clyfford Still, or one of Robert Motherwell’s blue paintings: the old Abstract Expressionist elite, New York’s first artistic avant-garde, are seldom far from Basquiat’s large-scale works. His favourite painter, apart from Cy Twombly, was Franz Kline. But, as in Twombly’s ...”

“... public reaction to the book has centred too narrowly on its slighting references to ex-colleagues. Robert Harris’s furious depiction of it (in the Independent on Sunday) as spluttering with ‘rage, malice, contempt and hatred’ is probably the extreme case. The memoirs of other premiers, Harris notes, have shown saintly restraint towards erstwhile ...”

“... Extracts, or pericopes – to borrow his typically ornate term – from Robert Craft’s diary of his years with Stravinsky first appeared in the famous series of their conversation books issued throughout the Sixties. In 1972, after the composer’s death, a far bigger selection was published as Stravinsky: Chronicle of a Friendship, 1948-1971 ...”

“... in the army, Jasper Johns, aged 23, moved back to New York City. There, a few months later, he met Robert Rauschenberg. Their artistic and romantic partnership would last until 1961; the company they kept included John Cage and Merce Cunningham. In this heady atmosphere, Johns chose, in autumn 1954, to destroy all his prior work, and to begin the paintings ...”

“... had introduced Cannadine and Cannadine had given us an encouragingly comical puff for his book, Robert Rhodes James reminded us that Lloyd George, despite doing so much to reduce the Upper House to impotence and discredit, had ended his days as Earl Lloyd George of Dwyfor, and then led us off down miles of corridors to a cellar under St Stephen’s Hall ...”

“... suspect that it is ‘an image of a place or condition they wished one day to arrive at, in full self-possession’. This belief renders the poet’s function pretty obscure. To credit the intuitive writer, as Redgrove seems to, with intuitive physical powers seems both sentimental and negative. It is as though a poet were no more than a dowser or ...”

“... George Barker and Edith Sitwell. Less than a decade later, with those roses seen as over-blown, Robert Conquest was deploring ‘the omission of the necessary intellectual component from poetry’, gathering several disparate writers under one umbrella, and announcing the striking out of New Lines. The Movement was succeeded by the Group (now what was ...”

“... work ethic. He was going to get the job done and nothing would distract him. He looked more like Robert Shaw, the great villain in From Russia with Love, than like any other Bond. He was unshaken, unstirred; dogged not feline, a terrier who made us wonder what those sleek, overdressed catlike figures had been doing these 44 years. Even his smart suits looked ...”

“... soon as it appears, and everyone still wants to be a gangster. He is not exactly a tragic hero, as Robert Warshow once suggested in a famous essay, but he is an embodiment of rogue power, a Robin Hood without the sentimental interest in the poor. Actually, gangsters in movies are always giving things away to children and widows, as Jack Nicholson hands out ...”

“... in the election. The SPD dropped to 16 per cent of the vote, a 138-year low. Tainted by its leader Robert Habeck’s determination to co-operate with Merz’s next government, the Greens – until recently the vanguard party of what Nancy Fraser calls ‘progressive neoliberalism’ – were punished severely, and reduced to such embarrassing moves as having ...”

“... child might be one of her terminated conceptions, but it’s more probable that it’s her former self. The poignancy works – just – because she has plunged us so deeply into her story, into her soul (a term she uses without irony). She does manage to hold her work this side of mawkishness and self-pity, and when she ...”

“... Berryman and Lowell were the great contemporary narrators, compulsive tellers of stories about the self, and their style was sharply and wholly comprehensive, perfectly expressing what Berryman’s mentor R.P. Blackmur called ‘the matter in hand’, as well as ‘adding to the stock of available reality’. Such poetry invented the ...”