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“... career as the avatar of the good and the not-so-good, still travelling in the wake of Little Richard. The history of rock ’n’ roll focuses on the white triumvirate – Presley, Buddy Holly and Jerry Lee Lewis, who have at different times heaped contumely on themselves – neglecting its roots in Jazz and the Blues, and a sibling relationship with ...”

“... down and going down, though there’s no doubt which one the audience prefers. 22 January. Take Richard Buckle’s autobiography, The Most Upsetting Woman, out of the London Library in order to refresh my memory of the Diaghilev exhibition in 1954. Buckle had organised it and put it on first at the Edinburgh Festival (a much smarter venue then than it is ...”

“... Revival of those years needed to counterbalance the waning radical commitments of the post-Eliot Faber list. Reprinting Finlay’s 1960 volume The Dancers Inherit the Party in 1969, with a few poems added, Montgomery presented it as a first edition rather than what it effectively was, a third. With anyone else an erratum slip might have sufficed, but the ...”

“... Oxford after I’d taken my degree I did research in medieval history, the subject of my research Richard II’s retinue in the last ten years of his reign. This took me twice a week to the Public Record Office then still in Chancery Lane and in particular to the Round Room, galleried, lined with books, a humbler version of the much grander Round Room in the ...”

“... which is still the most comprehensive and charming of all the guides. It has just been reissued by Faber.* ‘Colin’s son Richard is now editor of the Racing Pigeon. ‘The people who used to be into pigeon-fancying have changed altogether,’ says Colin, taking tea in Cockfosters. ‘They used to go down mines, or work in ...”

“... with its plea for ‘a new seriousness’, and again thirty years later when he describes in his Faber Book of Modern European Poetry (1992) the kind of poetry he most admires: ‘It is a poetry based on clarity, irony and a distaste for whatever is exaggerated or ornate or overstated, a poetry of private life, good behaviour and that much-abused term ...”

“... politely inquired: ‘Do you wish to pass me on the left or on the right?’ The incident, which Richard Boston recounts in his biographical memoir of Lancaster, captures something essential about a man who, as a cartoonist and writer excelled in capturing types, human and architectural, yet himself remained hard to typify. Georgian (Town) Pillar to ...”

“... poet and his or her reader are inhabitants of what W.H. Auden described in the introduction to his Faber Book of Modern American Verse as ‘a continent only partially settled and developed, where human activity seems a tiny thing in comparison to the magnitude of the earth’. In her more recent Faber Book of Contemporary ...”

“... Shakespear’, they were principally dedicated to Alexander Hoghton’s nephew, Sir Richard Hoghton. A small, possibly dwarfish fellow, an enthusiast of the ‘divine drugge’ tobacco, John Weever was one of those figures glimpsed on the edge of many literary scenes. Like Marlowe’s friend Thomas Nashe, his ubiquity seems to express a ...”

“... of tennis is missing from Caryl Phillips’s rather too random compilation, The Right Set: The Faber Book of Tennis, which I had looked forward to reading as an anthology that starts with Suzanne Lenglen and ends more or less with Venus Williams. The game’s tissue, if you will, is almost totally missing, which makes me suspect that Phillips threw it ...”

“... church. A mile or so beyond looms a larger sight that Rodinsky was spared: the 52 floors of Richard Seifert’s Natwest Tower, double-decker lifts, automatic window-washing facilities and all. Here again was the characteristic frisson of the zone of transition, where different worlds rub up against one another, languages intersect on every corner and ...”

“... they thought to displace. Interest in the English 1890s has naturally been growing of late. Richard Ellmann’s biography looked forward, emphasising the importance of Wilde as the martyred prophet of a new dispensation. Others have preferred to look back, finding in the poetry of the period a dilute version of the Symbolism of the Eighties. But John ...”

“... Cooke’s magisterial I saw the world end (1979) and the long essay by Michael Tanner in the Faber Wagner Companion (1979). The other three recent books are built on shakier foundations. Ewans, the author of a fine study of Janáček’s operas, here traces the allegedly strong Aeschylean influence on Wagner, while Furness and Martin discuss Wagner’s ...”

“... to count for more, on the grounds of being alive. Alive, for example, in parodic violence, as with Richard Curtis’s splendid ‘Skinhead Hamlet’ in the recent Faber Book of Parodies: Fortinbras: What the fuck’s going on here? Horatio: A fucking mess, that’s for sure. Fortinbras: No kidding. I see Hamlet’s ...”

“... not his type. And though he was a remarkably handsome sweetheart of a guy, not to mention a Faber poet, he sure as hell wasn’t mine. So all of that got sorted out from the get-go, and Thom was wonderfully kind to the women in my life, one after the other, and all of them adored him. He was a bit like a dream uncle: rather depraved, but endlessly ...”