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“... simply make[s] one sit still in an apathy, and watch the clock spinning backwards’. For Henry James, the war seemed ‘to undo everything’: ‘My sense of what is generally happening all about us here is only unutterable,’ he confessed to Brander Matthews. The country house, that central prop of the idyllic British afternoon, figured prominently in ...”

“... Lewis Carroll seems an obvious precursor of James Joyce in the world of elaborate wordplay, and critics have long thought so. Harry Levin suggested in 1941 that Carroll’s Humpty Dumpty was ‘the official guide’ to the vocabulary of Finnegans Wake. Why wouldn’t he be? He was the inventor of the portmanteau word (‘You see it’s like a portmanteau – there are two meanings packed up into one word’), an inspired parodist of what Saussure later called the arbitrariness of the linguistic sign (that is, its being grounded in nothing but convention) and extremely proud of his ability to ‘explain all the poems that ever were invented – and a good many that haven’t been invented just yet ...”

“... a close similarity between Wordsworth’s manifesto in the Preface to Lyrical Ballads, and Edward Marsh introducing the first Georgian anthology in 1912 with the statement that ‘English poetry is once again putting on a new strength and beauty.’ The difference is that Wordsworth really was heralding a new era of sensibility, as Ezra Pound was to do in his ...”

“... art: ‘plastic art’, ‘plastic merit’ and ‘plastic beauty’ were high compliments. Henry James, describing an aesthete, notes that ‘his appreciation ... was based partly on his fine sense of the plastic.’ Yet a hundred years after Baudelaire the figurative meaning of ‘plastic’ had fallen; it was now nearly synonymous with words like ...”

“... more astonishingly, when he told his horrified parents that he was engaged to the film star Mae Marsh, and again when he said he was set on becoming a wartime pilot, knowing all the while that no combatant service would have him. But one feels that Griffin is really telling us all this to make his hero more rather than less remarkable. Probably his greatest ...”

“... On 30 January, the day of the election, in Amara in the old marsh region of southern Iraq, the sheikh advances and smiles and hugs me and kisses me: once, twice, pauses and, as I am about to step away, a third time. He greets me in Farsi: ‘Khubi? Chetori? Hal-e-shoma chetor ast?’ He is speaking Farsi rather than Arabic as a joke, I think ...”

“... 1798 and 1803, prompting defensive measures, coastal fortifications and even plans to flood Romney Marsh. French troops landed not only in Ireland during the Rebellion of 1798, but also in Great Britain itself, at Fishguard, in 1797. While it was true, for the most part, that Britain ruled the waves, Napoleon reckoned that he only needed control of the Channel ...”

“... hours if a tricky rarity is glimpsed) when the bird is wrested from a backdrop of wind or sea or marsh, or singled out from a cloud of lookalikes, and then named. In their itch to tag the wild, birders travel through the world as if they were closing it down. For most birdwatchers – a far more numerous category: in Britain, the million-plus members of the ...”

“... by Wallace Stevens. Thick sleep, with error of the tangled wood, and vapour from the evening marsh of sense, and smoothness of the glide of Lethe, would inaugurate his dullard innocence, cool’d of his calenture, elaborate brute. That last line, in particular, might have come straight out of ‘The Comedian as the Letter C’. Sooner or later a ...”

“... together in England’. Yet during the lifetime of its members, who also included the engineer James Watt, the manufacturer Matthew Boulton and the chemist and radical Joseph Priestley, the Society was barely visible in print. No learned memoirs appeared under its auspices, no grand assemblies were organised by its fellowship. According to the son of the ...”

“... places and people on fire; a wild fox, alluring and unconstrained; a boat she has to pilot, a marsh or sandbank or peninsula she has to leave. All these figures come back in Tonight, a book as explicit as late Yeats or late Heaney in its return to the poet’s prior work. There are also recurring character types: during the late 1960s, guerrilla ...”

“... Thomson, the future BBC producer, and Denis Hills, the African explorer, destined to be rescued by James Callaghan from the clutches of Idi Amin. Michael Wharton spent much of his term-time practising West Riding Knife Throwing with his mates, or drinking in the magical St Ebbes quarter (recently flattened by commercial interests), playing dominoes with little ...”

“... We shall not find the “hungry Forties” or the Chartists in the world of the beginning: Tom’s Marsh Farm is still relatively isolated and Lydia comes there as a refugee from history: but we can watch Anna and Will begin to enter the mainstream of their time; and Ursula and Skrebensky live in a fully historic world.’ Like Paradise Lost, the novel moves ...”

“... to raise or consider with the appropriate finesse. The heroine of Civil to Strangers is Cassandra Marsh-Gibbon (Barbara Pym addressed herself as ‘Sandra’ in her Oxford diaries) and she is married to a vain, hypochondriac but (to her) lovable novelist called Adam. Pym wrote to Henry Harvey at the time that ‘Adam is sweet but very stupid. You are sweet ...”

“... Fry, too, was an Apostle. But the tentacular reach of the Apostles was epitomised by others. Eddie Marsh was, narrowly considered, a superior civil servant; less narrowly, he was not only an assistant private secretary to Joseph Chamberlain and Alfred Lyttelton, but an essential support to Winston Churchill. Nor ought we to overlook such figures as Sir John ...”