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“... without the other. Those who have both will find that, among contemporaries, Christopher Reid and Michael Hofmann are classified as love poets but Craig Raine and Tony Harrison as blue versifiers. Only a few poets make both, including Seamus Heaney, who has two poems unworthy of him in the Whitworth (one about unfreezing a vaginal pump, one about a ...”

“... The Authenticity of ‘Prometheus Bound’ (1977). In a recent edition of the play in translation, Michael Ewans argues that ‘in dramatic style and technique, as well as language and poetic style, Prometheus is markedly different from, and inferior to, the six other dramas’ in the Aeschylean canon. Ewans dates the play to c.440-430BC, twenty years after ...”

“... from their media involvement at the time – Richard Neville himself, Germaine Greer, Robert Hughes, Charles Shaar Murray. Some people died, but only the famously talented (Hendrix, Joplin, Morrison) stick in the public memory. Most of the freaks, hippies and radicals recognised that youth was just a holiday, and come the end of the summer of love they ...”

“... of English Poetry (1702), Anthony Ashley-Cooper praised it in his Characteristicks (1710), John Hughes discussed it in the Spectator (1712), Voltaire cited it in his Lettres philosophiques (1733), and in 1749 Robert Dodsley recommended memorising it as an exercise in mental self-training. In Derzhypilsky’s production, having been performed beautifully in ...”

“... editor. We had a committee consisting of John Fuller, Francis Hope, Martin Dodsworth, Colin Falck, Michael Fried and Gabriel Pearson. We never had meetings or anything like that. There was a lot of correspondence, because John went to Buffalo for a year. So he wrote to me a lot from there. And Michael and Colin had already ...”

“... all goes more smoothly. We are given the necessary information about the likes of Hockney, Ted Hughes, John Berger, Germaine Greer and Noam Chomsky. Structuralism and Post-Structuralism (‘a logical enough outcome’) are briskly explained, Barthes, Lacan and Derrida rush by, Foucault and Althüsser get a rather breathless mention as part of the ...”

“... of his sociable voices (echoes or not), Coleridge was diminished as a man and as a poet; and, as Michael Macovski has suggested, the absence of conversation affected him as a terrifying internal silence. Even after the conversations for which we chiefly remember him, however, his poems kept up a murmuring, an internal monologue that at times approaches the ...”

“... it was entirely in character that on her husband’s becoming Prelate of the Order of St Michael and St George she adopted the style of an (honorary) knight’s wife, though she had no right to it – was not wise in the management of a tough little boy and systematically denied him any display of love at all. Her own fortunes in love had been ...”

“... his most recent full-length opera, Gawain, has an ambitious verse libretto by David Harsent. Ted Hughes once wrote a libretto for Gordon Crosse. The Story of Vasco, whose subject-matter involves crows, is an interesting opera by a composer who has now, regrettably, stopped composing. The poet John Birtwhistle supplied David Blake with the libretto for his ...”

“... of machine guns’ or Céline’s bombs ‘like giant blossoms’. Celan’s poetry, at least in Michael Hamburger’s superb rendering, has an unluxuriating desolation which is quite extraordinary. To speak of agonised lyricism is for once to mean agonised rather than lyricism. There are poems in what English readers might recognise as the ...”

“... in what real estate agents now call ‘Nolita’ in Manhattan commemorates the stand Bishop Hughes took against a mob threatening to burn down his church in 1844. The defensive amalgamation of Irish, Catholic and Democrat extended into other eastern cities and towns (though not all, and not all the time). Byron concentrates on Americans whose ...”

“... the former Liberal leader Jo Grimond and middle-of-the-road Labour politicians like Cledwyn Hughes. On the other side of the argument were the bogeymen of British politics – from Enoch Powell, who was by then, scarier still, an Ulster Unionist, to Tony Benn and Michael Foot. With a sly coyness that sits oddly with ...”

“... been one of my strongest, most lasting influences.’ Readers might wonder where the poetry of Hughes, Heaney or Hill would be without some filtering of the tradition of Old English accentual poetry through Auden or Hopkins. Hopkins’s use of Old English is well-known (‘a vastly superior thing to what we have now’), but perhaps not the fact that ...”

“... Reform Bills, and the loss of its MP, one of the ministerial architects of the poll tax, Michael Ancram; or the fact that they came within the narrowest shave of losing their Defence Secretary George Younger, in Ayr – by general consent a good constituency MP, and a very possible successor to Mrs Thatcher. In crude terms, the Scots found the ...”

“... look, he selects areas already well investigated. If you’ve read David Newsome, Annan himself, Michael Holroyd and Hermione Lee on the Wilberforces, Leslie Stephen, Lytton Strachey and Virginia Woolf, you’re likely to know what’s coming before you’ve turned the page – and there’s a limit to the appeal even of Clapham psychodrama and Bloomsbury ...”