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“... recently dead friends and poets (Ted Hughes, Zbigniew Herbert, Joseph Brodsky, Norman MacCaig and George Mackay Brown) tend to be wide-ranging meditations on literature and language.In his criticism as well as his poetry, Heaney has always excelled at finding metaphors of process for the act of writing: moulding, thatching, digging. It is what makes him such ...”

“... nation. The Olympic Park was sited on a significant patch of ground: the memory field of Henry Miller’s fine but undervalued travel journal, The Colossus of Maroussi. It was written in the shadow of war and published in 1941. It was the first Miller title that Penguin felt brave enough to place on their list. Apart ...”

“... his ‘How I See It’ column for the last time; Conservatism in Basingstoke has a new face. Maria Miller is a working mother of three, campaigning vigorously on local issues: education, ‘local environment improvement’ and crime. She ought to win easily. The constituency, a hotbed of affluence, has returned a Tory in every election since World War ...”

“... tongue far enough into his cheek to be anything more tolerable than stomach-turning about Eton. George Orwell, who had been there too but thought it was possible to have a life afterwards, was surely right to tell him to come off it. Even if there were room for doubt in this matter, however, there can be no question that an ex-Colonial transplantee who ...”

“... he was for complicated reasons penniless and in practical terms homeless. His surviving brother, George, who would die of intestinal tuberculosis two decades later, was in America with his wife, Georgiana, trying to make his fortune; his dearest friend, Charles Armitage Brown, was on a summer walking tour, having frugally rented out the house he had been ...”

“... a prelapsarian refuge from the world of today. One such refuge could be found in the novels of George Eliot, which are populated by cottagers, carpenters, farmers’ wives, lacklustre clergymen and Methodist preachers. Characters of all classes are given their own opinions and idiomatic speech. Common experiences, quarrels, love and loss trump structural ...”

“... ignores. But he makes his case forcefully by letting loose Montaigne, La Rochefoucauld, Austen, George Eliot and Stendhal. He has an eye for the perfect quotation and sends you back to these writers better equipped to read them. Few are as good as the French moralists at fathoming the ways of vanity, pridefulness, hypocrisy and self-deception. If the ...”

“... we want treating like that.’ The chairman of the South Yorkshire Police Committee, Councillor George Moores, then spoke. Youngsters ‘come into the force as decent chaps and we send them away to training centres and they come back like Nazi storm-troopers.’ After listening to over an hour of complaints against the Police, the Deputy Chief Constable ...”

“... no sense of his importance to the paper. As much as the original editors and the founder, Karl Miller, Peter shaped the LRB. Unlike us, he never lost his temper. More adjusted than most to his own wants and necessities, and so better able to accommodate other people’s, he was an exemplary person to work with.He was born in New Zealand in 1937 (in a taxi ...”

“... and subjects: the gossip of the circle, dates and times of visits and rendezvous, the love-life of George Sand, the state of the Wharton marriage, the affair Mrs Wharton carried on with James’s friend Fullerton, the art of fiction, James’s state of health, and, to cap and threaten it all, the War. Some of these, it must be said, are more rewarding to read ...”

“... finding instant and compelling evidence to prove he was a complete nightmare. Yet this book by George Jacobs, who was Sinatra’s valet for 15 years, might be understood to be wired in a whole new way: it is perhaps the ultimate diatribe by the disgruntled ex-staffer; a new high point (or low point) in a super-readable genre that should surely be given its ...”

“... of his life, his surroundings improved – less of Noel Coward’s chic, as it were, and more of George Devine’s scruff. The glamorous world at which he had originally aimed didn’t really suit him anyway. When he has supper with Winston Churchill, the occasion is one of Pooterish maladroitness: As we three turned to seat ourselves again, I fancied I ...”

“... Lazarus Averbuch, a refugee from the 1903 Kishinev pogrom, went to see Chicago’s police chief, George Shippy, on 2 March 1908 and was shot dead. This killing mutates, in a febrile and not unfamiliar atmosphere of xenophobic dread in the American heartland, into a tale of heroic self-defence by a valiant policeman, saving himself – and by extension the ...”

“... way of life, producing for adversity truthful, distressing inventories and interiors – as in George Moore’s novel of the Nineties, Esther Waters, which starts with a manor house, servants and horses, and travels to Soho for compulsive gambling and a fatal cough. In Glasser’s book, and in Fraser’s, the activities of the poor can be seen as ...”

“... commemorating the tourist attraction which it was also to become. The third narrative tells how George Meredith modelled for the corpse in the painting and how his wife then ran away with the painter (see also the sonnets in Modern Love). The three tales are deftly assembled and get on very well together. Chatterton is represented in the novel as an ...”