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“... featuring a zither, two kinds of drum, a fiddle (European or Arabic) and an exciting flute-cum-horn called a ney. Sometimes the poets would get up and dance. A singer in a broad-shouldered suit, looking like Dean Martin or Max Bygraves, would swagger in and improvise verses: these were often satirical comments on state interference with independent-minded ...”

“... A decade-long resuscitation began with the 1960 reissue of his collaborative effort with James Agee, Let Us Now Praise Famous Men, which galvanised a new generation of social idealists and photographers. Then came the reissue of his book American Photography in 1962; a MoMA exhibition, in 1966, of subway photographs he’d taken in the 1930s and ...”

“... the tallow in shaving cream sold in Tokyo, the guts in the strings of tennis rackets, the hoof or horn in the keys of a piano, or rendered to thicken lipstick. The commodities that have their origin in the destroyed forest criss-cross the globe, each freight journey belching carbon into the atmosphere.There is a perverse, monstrous sublimity to this ...”

“... book is a magisterial study of a great popular artist: a full-scale interpretation of James Gillray’s output of satirical prints, and a biography that warrants comparison with the best ever done on an 18th-century artist. It has been furnished with gorgeous reproductions, along with close-ups that illuminate Gillray’s care for visual detail ...”

“... of English poetry – Hardy, Keats and Eliot notwithstanding. This is indeed one way to shoe-horn them into the contemporary literary consciousness, one way of giving readers familiar bannisters to hold as they climb to the bare place at the centre of the work. Yet it sets the controls just that bit off. English love poetry, even the poetry of Donne ...”

“... was the industry’s best year since 1921. As for the musicians, they remained exactly the same horn-blowing, piano-playing or rhythm-generating pros as before. To what extent they were affected by the political convictions of the time, and those of their patrons, is difficult to establish, though we may take it that the black artists shared the mass ...”

“... the PDP nomination for governor, but he hadn’t succeeded. There were also pictures of Governor James Ibori, even though he is not standing again: he probably wanted to remind everyone of the progress he has made here during his two terms as governor. He has appointed his cousin as his successor, much to the annoyance of Okocha and others who showed a ...”

“... James Angleton​ , chief of counterintelligence at the CIA for twenty years, was not the ideal spy. The ideal spy is a mouse-coloured blur in the crowd, someone like George Smiley, described by his wife as ‘breathtakingly ordinary’. There was nothing ordinary about Angleton. Once experienced, his history, his appearance, his manner, and his stubborn refusal to be clear were all indelible ...”

“... complete works were concocted in a single afternoon and evening by two young Australian poets, James McAuley and Harold Stewart, as part of a plot to expose the obscurantism and meaninglessness of what passed for poetry under the aegis of Modernism. The Malley oeuvre was composed, they were later to reveal, with the aid of a chance collection of books ...”

“... an impression of serenity and solidity, its confident and complacent rulers gazing on the Golden Horn, unaware of the rumblings in their lands; further east, the rulers of Persia failing to recognise that their kingdom was in terminal decline. Islam was, Rodinson explains, the last of the three monotheistic religions, after Judaism and Christianity, that met ...”

“... he should take his shoes off ‘for the place whereon thou standest is holy ground’. But Ora Horn Prouser says that the command ‘may simply appear to be about holiness’ when, actually, it defines the nature of the relationship between God and the Israelites. Captives are kept barefoot, and David fled barefooted from his son Absalom. Subjugation and ...”

“... and his fellow ‘Lunar Men’: the select club of Midlanders that included Joseph Priestley, James Watt and Erasmus Darwin. But many of Wedgwood’s more radical ideals were in direct conflict with the needs of his business, which involved putting expensive, intricate ornamental vases on royal and aristocratic tables to stimulate emulative demand among ...”

“... two supply vessels, led by Commodore George Anson, was to carry out a secret mission around Cape Horn, attacking Spanish ports on the Pacific coast and capturing one of their famed galleons full of silver en route from Mexico to the Philippines. From the outset, almost everything that could go wrong, did. Because of endless delays in fitting out the ...”

“... he was cautious to the last – have the sense of ‘being able to do what angels can’. James Wood writes: I have good reason to remember Frank Kermode’s collection of essays The Art of Telling, because it was the first book I ever stole. Between the ages of 16 and 18 I lifted more than a few books from shops. Resources were very slight, and the ...”

“... Fools’ War’. In his excellent introduction to this selection of Larkin’s letters home, James Booth quotes from its first page to demonstrate the nature of Larkin Senior’s political views: ‘Those who had visited Germany were much impressed by the good government and order of the country as by the cleanliness and good behaviour of the people ...”