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“... When Robert Stone’s best-known novel, Dog Soldiers, was published in 1974, there was a small but significant overlap of material with The Electric Kool-Aid Acid Test, Tom Wolfe’s souped-up, superheated journalistic account of the beginnings of the counterculture, published six years earlier. The coincidence of material was in many ways inevitable ...”

“... The first, the murdered 18-year-old victim of racism. The second, a cultural balloon with Stephen Lawrence’s image on it: a balloon so large there is barely any space left in which to think objectively about Lawrence, his murder and the subsequent investigations and Inquiry. These are the undisputed facts. Stephen ...”

“... Leslie Mitchell) is put forward as his country’s great 20th-century novelist: the Scottish D.H. Lawrence. Gibbon’s reputation substantially rests on A Scots Quair (‘quire’ – or ‘gathering of sheets’), also called ‘The Mearns Trilogy’, Mearns being an ancient name for Kincardineshire, now itself an ancient name after the county reorganisation ...”

“... through iron gratings into family vaults, with the names of the occupants chiselled above on stone panels. In another part of the cemetery are the slum quarters – crosses of rough stone, some of them leaning sideways, or upright stone slabs, or just oblongs of gravel enclosed by ...”

“... earlier poem’s materials remain. The ‘bitter nut’ which was raked up and became a ‘wept’ stone reappears: the petrified tear is disinterred now as a ‘petrified blessing’. The ground in which the speaker must dig for it is a grave. The ‘four-finger-furrow’ derives from an image sometimes carved into headstones in Jewish cemeteries. The ...”

“... involved with the area. When George Bernard Shaw, who lived in the nearby village of Ayot St Lawrence, needed a garage, he asked Parker (his revolving writing hut was Shaw’s own work).Stevenage and Hemel Hempstead followed Letchworth and Welwyn in the first wave of postwar new towns. Few realise that Hatfield was another, a town extension planned and ...”

“... for us squeamish art-lovers to accept, but much less potent. Speaking of trapdoors and false fire, Lawrence Lipking regrets that Mozart should have ‘spent his genius on an outmoded moral relic, thrilling but not serious’, yet old myths are serious, and they die hard. To get his Faust off the hook, it took Goethe something like a verbal quibble, and then ...”

“... Its opening lines step forward with a cool swagger, toying with Virgilian cadences: ‘I write of stone. I write of Italy where stone is habitual.’ The reader is invited to fall in with a persona of Baedekered cosmopolitanism and sensual self-assurance. ‘We are prepared to enjoy ...”

“... Larry, it isn’t that life is so short, it’s that it’s everlasting!’ Henry Miller wrote to Lawrence Durrell in 1959. The formula, if one were to look to history for clues, seems fairly simple. Be white, male, fairly imposing in stature, and in possession of a large ship and obedient crew. Mysteriously circle the coast of a remote tropical island ...”

“... the American champions at the Los Angeles games of 1932 before a Japanese team headed by the eight-stone 14-year-old Kitamura. Japanese officials had photographed every aspect of Johnny Weismuller’s famous crawl, and perfected it for their own physique, as they had perfected other aspects of Western technology. Sprawson himself has swum the Hellespont ...”

“... the sea and was designed by White, with fountains and statues, formal hedges, arbours, colonnades, stone benches, rows of potted orange trees and a windmill. White’s origins were comparatively humble, but the families he and his son married into were upper-crust and rich. They had sailboats and horses and tennis courts and picnics – every ingredient for ...”

“... his only book.) For a time in the 1920s he promised to be a literary figure, ‘the next D.H. Lawrence’ and then Lawrence’s intended biographer, but life had other, dimmer plans for him. The Book of Ebenezer Le Page was completed shortly before his death, dedicated and its copyright made over to a young couple who ...”

“... for 43 years, Parliament was told nothing. In 2010 an SDS officer, who under the alias Mark Stone had infiltrated the climate change movement, was exposed, then identified in the media, when his girlfriend found a passport in his real name, Mark Kennedy. By the end of 2011, eight women had begun legal proceedings against the Metropolitan Police ...”

“... From then on, she was like a hunted priest in penal times, travelling dangerously with the altar-stone of the forbidden faith, disposing the manuscripts for safe keeping among the secret adherents. And inevitably, having consecrated herself a guardian, she was destined to become a witness. As a consequence, the mature work of a great poet survived, and two ...”

“... come about: the wonder is that it has come about at all. Fifty-eight years have passed since Major Lawrence Grand launched his ‘Section D’ in a niche of the old War Office, which had concluded, quite privately in the wake of the Munich sell-out of the Czechs, that a war with Hitler’s Germany would be unavoidable, in which case several European countries ...”