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“... One day of early winter my friend D, arriving unexpectedly in London, telephoned to ask me to attend the funeral of someone I had never met or heard of – B, the 17-year-old son of a friend of his. He had flown from America for the funeral and to do all he could for the mother and stepfather of B, whom he regarded as a promising young artist and the most lively and intelligent boy he knew ...”

“... to the hyper-rational world. He didn’t pose as a guru like Ken Kesey, Carlos Castaneda or Robert Bly; nor did he adopt the unhinged expressionism of Hunter S. Thompson. He never wanted to build a movement, evangelise for drug use or found a school. Instead, he leaves space for scepticism and the possibility that there’s more than one way of ...”

“... autobiographical anecdotes for fables. In the final piece in her 2009 essay collection, The Winter Sun: Notes on a Vocation, she goes to a café in Paris to meet an unnamed older woman, vaguely a colleague, whose existential pronouncements bear down harshly: ‘You are welcome to commit suicide. Everyone is … Suicide bombers don’t want to live ...”

“... Going to Church (1867), a depiction of settlers in New Plymouth trudging through their first winter. Why the snow seemed important I’m not sure. Perhaps extreme cold, and unpreparedness for it, enhances the drama of history, pointing up heroism and hardship. In the time I was writing about there were snowflakes the size of shillings. Beards froze so ...”

“... words were. ‘We say “hunger”, we say “tiredness”, “fear”, “pain”, we say “winter” and they are different things. They are free words, created and used by free men.’ There are sayings, proverbs and rhymes on the walls of the huts, all praising ‘order, discipline and hygiene’, and on a shelf in a corner there are ‘two rubber ...”

“... sluggishness of feeling: Twenty-some years ago, I read Graham Stuart Thomas’s ‘Colour in the Winter Garden’. I didn’t plant a winter garden, but the book led on to his rose books: ‘The Old Shrub Roses’, ‘Shrub Roses of Today’, and the one about climbers and ramblers. (‘Horse-Chestnut Trees and ...”

“... sorts of American writers: the young Allen Ginsberg paid him homage and copied his style, while Robert Lowell, for example, looked to Williams for a freer, more democratic manner than his rivals could offer. Though he remains an acquired taste in Britain, Williams’s position in American poetry, at least, seems assured. That position rests, above all ...”

“... via Bret. Like its predecessor, the book centres on Clay’s return to LA from the East Coast one winter. Now a screenwriter, of all things, he is in flight from a failed relationship, and finds himself reunited with some of his old friends from previous novels, including his ex-girlfriend Blair, her now husband Trent, and Julian, now a recovering addict who ...”

“... ones. The bags were then transported to Kazakhstan. In the freezing conditions of the steppe winter, in the mouldering warehouse, the dodgy labels began to peel off, revealing the true provenance of the chemicals. And in the spring, XCorp’s auditors decided to do a stock check of chemicals at the facility. In interview, the conspirators seem to speak ...”

“... irregular line of elms by the deep lane’. And like Sonnets from the Portuguese, which Robert Browning had advised Elizabeth to present as translations, and which were not published as her own until her death, Aurora Leigh is a remarkable tribute to the way in which new female independence, intelligence and sensibility can go with an equally ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... knowing either of them, he began to develop a talent for mathematics. He also befriended Lester Winter, a ‘polished, worldly, well-groomed’ young man who introduced him to the work of Robert Frost and Edna St Vincent Millay. Winter planned to become a dentist but had artistic ...”

“... against Parliament, that the recusant Lord Monteagle handed over to James’s secretary of state, Robert Cecil, just before the plot was exposed. But Shakespeare had used a similar plot device in Twelfth Night (the comedy that is remembered in the Fool’s song at the end of Act III, scene ii), and even Shapiro admits that the writing of the episode in King ...”

“... The​ Rev. Thomas Robert Malthus liked to look on the bright side. True, that hasn’t been the usual assessment: his Essay on the Principle of Population (1798) was intended to drench the parade of Enlightenment optimism about human possibility. The Radical writer Richard Price reckoned that an expanding population was a good thing, and that it would follow inevitably from more virtuous forms of government ...”

“... springs a surprise: the individual most responsible for Britain’s current plight is Sir Robert Peel. The repeal of the Corn Laws defused the revolutionary potential of the working class and gave it an interest in the preservation of empire. Peel’s ‘historic compromise’ thus led to the dominant role of ‘finance capital’ and, in due ...”