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“... statelet was not a democracy, it was a holding operation which its founding fathers, Carson and Craig, thought would last only thirty years beyond 1921. It’s high summer but the political process continues, always with a desultory, slightly phony quality as political commentary oscillates between anxiety and maybe unearned certainty that some irenic ...”

“... Between the Acts. Miss La Trobe, who stages a history of England, may have been modelled on Edith Craig, the artist daughter of Ellen Terry, who designed some of the movement’s banners. When he created the spectacular story of the nation for the opening of the Olympic Games, Danny Boyle rightly included a glimpse – it was only a glimpse – of a ...”

“... is the obligatory condition of the sovereign or the sovereign’s mother, the heir to the Virgin Mary, the carpenter’s wife cuckolded by God. The Annunciation according to the gleeful G.G. Belli:Mary, eating soup for lunch, was still a virgin – just.Gabriel, an angel, hurled by god, like a bolt, brokethrough a ...”

“... looked on as electricity was applied to the bodies of dead animals. They twitched terrifyingly. (Mary Shelley attended such a demonstration before writing Frankenstein.) At some demonstrations the heads of decapitated dogs convulsed. At others, cicadas sang. The effects of electricity on human corpses were also demonstrated, or performed. Fraudsters took ...”

“... in the loss of ‘sizzling sausages’ and ‘tikka chicken’. Ewart’s other accuser is a Mary Whitehouse-like 50-year-old editress with blue-rinse hair who represents the staid interests of ‘the Poetry Readers’ Association’ and regrets to inform him that his poetry is ‘sheer filth’. This, too, is wide of the mark, though not as wide as we ...”

“... would make a point with Swiftian savagery, as in July 1977 when the Gay News trial came to court. Mary Whitehouse, the campaigner against the ‘permissive society’, had brought a private prosecution against the magazine on a charge of blasphemous libel because of a poem by James Kirkup it had published which described Jesus having sex with a variety of ...”

“... nothing. If it is to be like that, let it be like that.’ In 1936 Beckett wrote from Hamburg to Mary Manning in further despair: ‘My next work shall be on rice paper wound about a spool, with a perforated line every six inches and on sale in Boots. The length of each chapter will be carefully calculated to suit with the average free motion. And with every ...”

“... of contemporary events for the illustrated newspapers in the 1880s and 1890s. Lance Calkin, Frank Craig, Samuel Begg, Paul Renouard and others filled the pages of the Illustrated London News, the Graphic and Black and White while continuing to exhibit at the Royal Academy and the Salon. Their newspaper work – its realism and variety of subjects, its ...”

“... phrase coup de foudre for the act of falling in love. A general critical study of Kipling prefaces Craig Raine’s Faber selection of prose by the writer. Raine’s remarkably penetrating, sympathetic essay – the best introduction to Kipling since Miss Tompkins’s work was published – mentions this image of the charcoal corpses as something that ‘never ...”

“... drinks into the garden at the front and I showed Seamus a gap in the trees and the beauty of Ailsa Craig, the rock that stands between Ireland and Scotland. ‘When Keats walked this coast he felt it followed him,’ I said. But our plans involved Robert Burns. Karl, since he first began publishing Seamus in the New Statesman in the 1960s, always felt there ...”