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“... a ‘self’ at all.Among Creeley’s early correspondents were Charles Olson and William Carlos Williams, who served, somewhat, as father figures. His actual father, a doctor, died when Creeley was four, after which the family’s fortunes took a serious downturn. Creeley first wrote to Williams in February ...”

“... enlightened and rational people should have entertained such improbabilities is a question Glyn Williams asks with increasing wonder in his account of the five principal eras of Northwest navigations. He finds no simple answer. Obsession, greed, fame, public spirit, ambition, curiosity, even revenge play parts in the narrative, whose constant theme is the ...”

“... Everybody knows – Paul Muldoon said it on the radio recently – that writing poetry can only get harder the more you keep at it. Against that is the belief, or perhaps the determination, that it shouldn’t. That instead of the diminishing returns, spending twice the time saying half as much twice as cumbrously/flashily/winsomely, one should use craft and expertise to overthrow the stiflement and self-importance of craft and expertise – to be as uninhibited and fresh and airy as a beginner ...”

“... his music is not that it is folkish – that is the impression to be had from swathes of Vaughan Williams, Holst, Kodály – nor that it is ‘art music’, but that it has a ‘natural’ and unideological fluency and force. Though Bartók had strong nationalist feelings, and expressed them in his music, his works rarely seem limited thereby. The ‘art ...”

“... current intellectual problem is to find an alternative myth (for Rudolf Bahro and Raymond Williams ecology was the green hope, as the red faded). In Das Kapital, published a few years earlier, Karl Marx tore apart the workings of the 19th-century world. But, notoriously, he never said much about the earthly paradise he hoped for. Looking backward ...”

“... resignation. A scattering of dissident voices on the payroll – Seumas Milne, Owen Jones, Zoe Williams, George Monbiot – were drowned out by a host of detractors, from within the paper and without: Tim Bale, Nick Cohen, Anne Perkins, Michael White, Martin Kettle, Peter Hain, Alan Johnson, Tony Blair (twice), Jonathan Jones, Frank Field, David Miliband ...”

“... Hofmann’s book comes in the footsteps of Tony Harrison’s Continuous, Craig Raine’s Rich, Paul Muldoon’s Quoof and Hugo Williams’s Letters Home, all of which voyage round the paterfamilias: that tradition is much more pious and affectionate. The Williams offers the closest ...”

“... name ‘the Hungry Generation’ (later the ‘Hungryalists’). But, like William Carlos Williams in America, they decried what they called the ‘vegetarian’ vocabulary of the educated classes and championed the demotic: ‘This language had never been heard in Bengali literature. With it they hoped to break down metre, rhyme and, while they were ...”

“... is not necessarily a disproportionate threat,’ wrote the American moral theologian Paul Ramsey in his book of 1968, Just War. The argument is that if the only way to prevent the most disproportionate thing imaginable – all-out nuclear war – is to threaten the use of nuclear weapons, then that threat may be considered in itself proportionate ...”

“... Of Tony Crosland: ‘For him informality is a sort of substitute for radicalism.’ Of Shirley Williams: ‘the most reactionary politician I know’. Of Neil Kinnock: ‘not a substantial person. He is a media figure really.’ The central fascination of these Diaries is the gradual transformation of the bright young dynamic dinner-partying careerist of ...”

“... as part of an early ‘mixed couple’ in the suburbs, where she brought up their two children: Paul, the historian and author of There Ain’t No Black in the Union Jack, and Darla-Jane, a dress designer and teacher (Gilroy herself looks super stylish in the photographs in this book; her outfits have been included in exhibitions at the V&A). It isn’t ...”

“... don’t you go writing any more of them, Melvyn, until we’ve all had time to catch up.’ Even Paul Theroux’s most devoted readers might by now be puffing a bit and asking for time to catch up. After a fertile beginning (five books in the first seven or so years), Theroux has doubled his striking rate: since Sinning with Annie (1975) he has published 14 ...”

“... R.W. Burchfield and John Sykes) is comparatively stable. When work began on the new Collins, Paul Procter and Della Summers were young conductors under impresario Urdang, and they later moved on to make dictionaries for Longman. Patrick Hanks was recruited to complete the Collins when he had finished a somewhat similar job for Hamlyn. Both Urdang and ...”

“... imply answers by no means favourable to Orwell) was echoed or extended in Britain by Raymond Williams, who turned Orwell’s achievement on its head by postulating an early praiseworthy socialist militant who became in the last books a passive though still radical pessimist, and managed to combine the pessimism with ‘an accommodation to capitalism and ...”

“... or to future generations the overflowings of [my] mind ...’ The passage is quoted both by Paul Dawson and Claire Tomalin, and I can give no better indication of the different styles and standpoints of their two books than by reproducing their comments on it. Dr Dawson, whose work is a detailed, scholarly study of Shelley’s political ideas, writes ...”