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“... Idealism as a clean break, which occurred some time in 1898. At the end of that year he said, ‘Moore and I rebelled against both Kant and Hegel. Moore led the way, but I followed closely in his footsteps.’ Thanks to Moore, he could, he said, ‘rejoice in the thought that grass is ...”

“... and Valéry, inward and intricate like Eliot and Pessoa, serenely eccentric like Marianne Moore, public and overflowing like Neruda and Pound. One of the strangest and most tantalising of these images is that of Yeats, both worldly and spiritualist, silly like us, as Auden said (sillier, some would say), and yet wonderfully hard-headed. But there ...”

“... but without it life would be meaningless as well. Or so the characters come to suspect. Michael Ahearn, the leading man of Stone’s new novel, Bay of Souls, starts out as one of these worldly protagonists. Quietly dissatisfied, fond of the bottle but sustained by the unexamined vestiges of Catholic faith, he teaches American literature in a sterile ...”

“... more of Sweeney Agonistes and less of the Four Quartets; who can imagine Lorenz Hart and Marianne Moore in the same lineup; who like poems that could be set to music by George Gershwin or Kurt Weill, brittle and easy, wearing their sadness lightly, unafraid of the obvious. ‘We may never ever meet again/On the bumpy road to love’; ‘Oh it’s a long long ...”

“... oddly straightforward passages from the letters of Philip Larkin or the conundrum that is Marianne Moore (and her mother). Nabokov puts in an appearance, but only to have his dictum ‘My private tragedy, which cannot, indeed should not, be anybody’s concern, is that I had to abandon my natural language’ opposed and overturned by her own: ‘My private ...”

“... In Tom Stoppard’s Jumpers, Dorothy Moore – a retired music-hall chanteuse and the wife of a moral philosopher called George Moore – is going dotty in her bedroom. The precipitating cause is a televised fight between the first two astronauts to land on the Moon about who gets to go back home on a damaged lunar ascent module that can carry only one ...”

“... subject and a common belief that the method of analysis they had learned from Frege, Russell, Moore and Wittgenstein constituted a great advance over previous ways of doing philosophy and over the techniques of their Continental rivals. Nowhere is this confidence better epitomised than in the notorious paper delivered by Ryle at the conference on La ...”

“... This was a formula which they had originally extracted from the last two chapters of G.E. Moore’s Principia Ethica and which stressed the virtues of civilised private life over the vulgarity of Victorian values, which came – if one is to judge from Lytton Strachey’s Eminent Victorians – to materialism at home and imperialism abroad. Private ...”

“... This is not survivor’s humour – in the line of resistance from Dorothy Parker to Lorrie Moore – which seeks finally to claim health and deny pain. Davis’s fussy drone is never funny like that, but she never stops being funny either. When the young man tears through the great books only to become ‘indignant’ at their failings, she doesn’t ...”

“... but clichés. The actors who are superb are all those – Anne Archer, Madeleine Stowe, Julianne Moore, Matthew Modine, Frances McNormand – who get a chance to underact, to play through despair and calamity as if they were just everyday weather. There is a moment in the film which is pure Altman, as good as anything he has ever done. The man who is ...”

“... have been quick to spot the opportunities presented by the crisis. Doubters need only think of Jo Moore, Stephen Byers’s adviser, who got into trouble for suggesting that the attack on the World Trade Center provided a perfect opportunity to bury bad news. The battle-hardened ideologues who direct American foreign policy are no less cynical, and ...”

“... light on architectural details or plumb the shadows of other rooms where other works lurk (a Henry Moore? another Epstein?). In a shot that is, cinematically speaking, pure Harry Potter, a statue of St George and dragon floats in mid-air without its plinth, then is gone in a twinkle of computer-generated lens flare. In fact, some of the best and strangest ...”

“... malevolent, piteous or merely inaccurate, ought to be wound up after the publication of Michael Straight’s contribution. Very possibly, Anthony Blunt will one day write such a book himself. But the names have almost all been named, the questions of motive worn smooth, the titles and pensions (some of them) stripped like epaulettes, the spell in ...”

“... have they gone, all these records I’ve had in my head for years, just in case Roy Plomley or Michael Parkinson or Sue Lawley or whoever used to do My Top Twelve on Radio One asked me in as a late and admittedly unknown replacement for somebody famous?’ And what was Rob’s killer move when he was in the process of getting to know Laura in the first ...”

“... the other hand, is very much a book with a deducible moral. It describes a few days in the life of Michael Dillon, a thirtyish former poet now managing a hotel in his native Belfast. Dillon is on the point of leaving his wife Moira (beautiful, bulimic, too tightly wrapped for her own good) for his girlfriend Andrea (early twenties, Canadian, a BBC radio ...”