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“... This book​ is almost parodically characteristic of Robert Macfarlane’s work. He is a scholar of place – of terrain, terroir, the land – and at times references, sources and citations have bulked uncomfortably large in his writing. Certainly he frequents the countryside at close quarters and often strenuously ...”

“... spiders; a menacing black servant with eyes glowing like coals; a naked young woman supine on a stone altar, breasts heaving, knife raised over her throat. But only a minority of his novels involve devil-worship; Baker’s title ties together the thing that brought in the money with the obsession that underpins all his work: social class. Wheatley suffered ...”

“... did A.J.P. Taylor very much good – any more than it did Michael Foot, Harold Nicolson, Robert Bruce-Lockhart, Tom Driberg or any of the other literati who seem to have lost a dimension in the service of that heterogeneous collection of unlikeable lost causes that Beaverbrook picked up. Taylor wrote that the Express was what England would have been ...”

“... divided lyric voice. ‘The Knife’ opens: The knife of my brain made incision, my dear, on the stone of my love. In the famous poem ‘An Tathaich’ (‘The Haunting’) ‘the triumphant face of a girl/that is always speaking’ obsesses the poet, urging him in terms like a reworking of lines from ‘The Hollow Men’: It is saying to my heart that a ...”

“... member of the Javidan guards, the ‘Immortals’. And there was a spray of withered roses on the stone. The old guardian wandered up to us and muttered Baksheesh. He settled for 50 piastres. In the end, it cost the equivalent of just 25 pence to sit at the feet of the King of ...”

“... can be, and what a torture of guilt it makes breaking away.’Auden was 15 when his schoolfriend Robert Medley suggested that he might try his hand at writing poems.Kicking a little stone, he turned to meAnd said, ‘Tell me, do you write poetry?’I never had, and said so, but I knewThat very moment what I wished to do.At ...”

“... One summer in the Scottish Hebrides young and mysterious Mr Stone meets up with middle-aged, forceful occultist Mr Dukes. Mr Dukes is sexually attracted to Mr Stone but Mr Stone is attracted more by flighty, playful barmaid Kate. Dukes reacts by subjecting Stone to aggressive Tarotist analysis ...”

“... with only three: Fernand Braudel has been my mentor for more than quarter of a century; Lawrence Stone guided my first steps into the maze of Anglo-American historiography; Christopher Hill accompanied, a long time ago now, the infant squawks of my early Marxism, which today is much eroded. Though if I still preserve some traces of my belief in that ...”

“... is being used to pave the way for Turkey’s entry into the European Union. Meanwhile, in Britain, Robert Bittlestone has recently argued that Odysseus’ homeland is not modern Ithaki, but the peninsula of Paliki, now attached to Kefalonia, but once, he claims, a separate island. Geologists may manage to prove that Paliki was once detached from Kefalonia, but ...”

“... grunt Tim O’Brien, face the darkness squarely. The third, former US Secretary of Defence Robert McNamara, merely pretends to. In his own way, however, each writer tells the story of a quest or a flight, a search for redemption and understanding, a search for the truth, or an escape from it. Each, in his own way, is likewise a cipher for the American ...”

“... imagination stretches from primeval man, arranging ‘meaningful phonemes to the beat of stone upon stone or to the sound of hollowed logs used as drums’, to the impact on book business, eons hence, of ‘the global village green … undisciplined, polymorphous and polyglot, as has been our fate and our milieu ...”

“... and Reznikoff, and of course the whole group of poets associated with Black Mountain College – Robert Creeley, Denise Levertov, Ed Dorn, Robert Duncan and Charles Olson. Of all these it was Charles Olson who engaged most directly and continuously with the implications of Pound’s poetics. The Maximus Poems can he read ...”

“... to come turned over inside her with a throb and showed the meanness of something hidden under a stone. These sudden movements within her often changed her from persecutor to victim, with her husband, her children, anyone. In the end Maureen does trust herself, but – the final irony – it’s at the cost of abandoning all responsibility, as she runs ...”

“... the sun was plausible at morning Nor how it was distributed at noon, And not how much the single stone could show But rather how much brilliance it would shun; Simply a paring down, a cleaving to One object, as the star-gazer who sees One single comet polished by its fall Rather than countless, untouched galaxies. This is a splendid poem from its ...”

“... peer, Victor Bulwer-Lytton, the second Earl of Lytton; her late father was the poet and statesman Robert Bulwer-Lytton, who had been viceroy of India at the time of the Great Famine of 1876. This was her first stay in prison, and she had been looking forward to seeing how badly women were treated there: instead she was placed in the hospital wing, where she ...”