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“... 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 Arabs. The poets admired these witticisms very much. At the Baghdad Shooting Club (hard by the Baghdad Horsemen’s ...”

“... Literature Association, has some plums. Of especial unforgettableness are a burst of rage from Martin Green against ‘charm’ as imbuing the Peter Pans of Barrie and of Disney; a vindication of Amy March as holding the right attitudes to art and to life – this by Anne Hollander; by Ronald Berman a perfectly ridiculous analysis of the child’s eye as ...”

“... In a letter to the Beales, clients for his best-known house, Standen, Webb describes how their butler fed him in their absence, but adds that ‘I had to refrain from a lovely fruit pie and strawberries and cream set out to tempt me from the path of wisdom.’ Remarking on this, Mark Girouard has written: ‘One can’t help feeling that Webb would have ...”

“... Perchance to Dream (1991), a sequel to The Big Sleep, was hampered by its title, which caused Martin Amis to wonder in the New York Times if Sleep Bigger or The Bigger Sleep would have done the job more effectively. The Black-Eyed Blonde might seem to go too far the other way, but it’s an echt Chandlerism: Banville took it from a list of titles Chandler ...”

“... my pieces passed through the office. In his mind only men were philosophers. The other was Judith Butler. I had written a commentary on one of her books, and she wrote a reply to be published along with it. In the draft of her response, she referred to me by my surname and, once, as ‘he’. Just a few lines later she wrote: ‘It is surely important to ...”

“... David Runciman, Neal Ascherson, James Butler, T.J. Clark, Jonathan Coe, Sionaidh Douglas-Scott, Daniel Finn, Dawn Foster, Jeremy Harding, Colin Kidd, Ross McKibbin, Philippe Marlière, James Meek, Pankaj Mishra, Jan-Werner Müller, Susan Pedersen, J.G.A. Pocock, Nick Richardson, Nicholas Spice, Wolfgang Streeck, Daniel TrillingDavid RuncimanSo who​ is to blame? Please don’t say the voters: 17,410,742 is an awful lot of people to be wrong on a question of this magnitude ...”

“... are indeed pastiches: Victoriana as a queer theorist might perform it, with costumes by Judith Butler, prisons and madhouses by Foucault. They are indeed frissony, being peopled by young women just becoming aware of their sexuality, in scenarios involving much disguise and dissembling, and silky drawers with slits. But the books are less theatrical, less ...”

“... of most viewers’ and ‘overestimates that of most artists’. (I found myself thinking about Martin Amis – that thing he used to say about ‘the talent elite’.) The art Nelson likes, on the other hand, has spaces in it, gaps and holes, swerves and paradox, opening ‘the possibility – and sometimes the arrival – of a third term into a situation ...”

“... other places – suggest affirmative answers. Two notable studies have appeared recently: Marilyn Butler’s Romantics, Rebels and Reactionaries, reviewed in the LRB (Vol. 3, No 21) by Christopher Ricks; and Thomas McFarland’s marvellously over-the-top Romanticism and the Forms of Ruin, which also appeared in 1981. (One might commend, en passant, the ...”

“... subject to political debate. But in English literary culture since the Romantic period, as Marilyn Butler has shown, there has been an opposing tendency, a reaction against Enlightenment values and a tendency to exalt the inner, authentic world of the imagination against a political world considered to be irredeemably fallen and inauthentic. Few critics have ...”

“... general and had denied everything. In the same month he had given his version of events to Martin Redmayne, the chief whip, in the presence of Tim Bligh, the prime minister’s private secretary, and had asked if he should resign. Probably every other Conservative whip since the war would have said, ‘Yes, and come back into the government when all ...”

“... the exotic array of worst-case scenarios we are now faced with. In his book Our Final Century, Martin Rees puts the chances of the human race surviving the next hundred years at 50:50.* The list of things that could go horribly wrong ranges from the highly unlikely (a giant asteroid strike) to the frankly bizarre (rogue scientific experiments rolling the ...”

“... another connection to Jane Elgee before her marriage. In a letter to his son William in 1921, John Butler Yeats wrote of Jane Wilde: ‘When she was Miss Elgee, Mrs Butt found her with her husband when the circumstances were not doubtful, and told my mother about it.’ Butt enjoyed various romances, and was, on occasion, heckled at public meetings by the ...”

“... plaintive rider:I have completed the census form while strongly objecting to the agency, Lockheed Martin, that is carrying it out. Information of this nature should only be divulged to a government agency under the direct control of parliament. Lockheed is basically an arms manufacturer and thus not the most scrupulous of organisations. This is an undertaking ...”

“... Ginsberg himself was suspended for a year from Columbia for writing ‘Fuck the Jews’ and ‘Butler has no balls’ in the grime on his window pane. (‘But he is a Jew,’ the Dean puzzled.) He was only allowed back with a note of clearance from his psychiatrist. A couple of years later, in 1949, Ginsberg found himself sharing his East Side apartment ...”