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“... of the Guildford Four are a politically heterogeneous bunch: at one end, Cardinal Basil Hume, Robert Kee, Merlyn Rees, Lord Scarman and the late Lord Devlin; at the other, rhetoric-ridden, far-left Trotskyist groupings. And in between the world and its dog. The only thing on which all are agreed – some with more knowledge of the facts than others – is ...”

“... Patterson hunted them down. The railway climbed on, created a little town of corrugated iron and green canvas in an insect-ridden swamp fed by a little river called, in Masai, ‘Nairobi’, meaning ‘cold water’, and drove on to Lake Victoria. As Kenneth Cameron puts it, ‘East Africa had become safariland.’ I was disappointed not to see Cameron’s ...”

“... box and stand up for heroin?’And it’s an essay of a modernity you don’t expect from the leaf-green Penguin Crimes of the 1950s, a close study of duration, airlessness, inescapability. The long hours in Court No. 1 at the Old Bailey, beneath its ritual function ‘no more than a large room’. Days and nights and years as suffered by the poor dying ...”

“... Moore would say that she is ‘too unrelenting’ in The Colossus, her first book of poems; Robert Lowell would put the same thought another way by saying that in Ariel she was playing ‘Russian Roulette with six cartridges in the cylinder’. I also remember feeling that I was liking something that it was a cliché for me to like. I thought she was ...”

“... can see, was a Ulysses of the Dantean phase, with an unappeasable hunger for wilder shores. In Robert Paltock’s Peter Wilkins the hero makes landfall in the Antarctic; where the inhabitants, like the fish of the Southern Hemisphere, can fly. There he falls in love with the beautiful Youwarkee, who falls to earth outside his hut. Strange remote stuff, but ...”

“... him as politically more intransigent than less mystic opponents of the Tory war regime. He pursued Robert and Leigh Hunt venomously, for having taken his paintings of Nelson and Pitt to be icons of reaction (a mistake, if it was one – Blake himself never said so – shared by not a few art historians), accusing them of responsibility for a war they were more ...”

“... he could have been another Beefheart. Instead, he peeled off into racist millennialism, the Green Room at San Quentin, the TV interviews – in which he looks like a wasted George Best carved out of rotten marzipan. Manson’s career proves, if nothing else, that satire has a strictly enforceable shelf-life. The high-risk conclusion to Watson’s epic ...”

“... The Grapes of Wrath is an appallingly hollow posture of stoicism; The Informer risible; How Green Was My Valley a monstrous slurry of tears and coal dust; Tobacco Road meandering nonsense; Three Godfathers shameless; and The Fugitive inane. Mister Roberts is pious; Gideon boring; The Long Gray Line monotonous. Stagecoach is sometimes cited for its ...”

“... whom he greatly admired. (For example, seeking a stanza form suitable for his elegy on Robert Gregory, he silently adopted that used by Cowley three hundred years earlier in his verses on the death of William Harvey.) On the whole it was probably just as well that Trinity, the Ascendancy college, was barred to him. He often complained of the ...”

“... in 1935: ‘My heart always warms to people who do not come to see me, especially Americans.’ To Robert Bridges there is a judicious criticism of Hopkins (sprung rhythm is not difficult to write well, but Hopkins writes it badly) and he thanks Witter Bynner for admiring ‘my poems even more than I admire them myself’. The show-off element is strong, and ...”

“... in the Dolomites. On the ledge which was now our goal, huge tumps of sea-thrift bulbed out like green brains. As Ed’s silhouette merged with the silhouette of one tump, I saw it as a thought absorbed back into a mind. When I told him this fifteen minutes later, he laughed and said: ‘Oh no! I hoped they were breasts, and I was suckling up to them!’ As ...”

“... there quickly as we could and, you know, everything was very calm and peaceful. England lay like a green carpet below me and the war seemed worlds away. I could see Tunbridge Wells and the sun glinting on the river, and I remembered that last weekend I’d spent there with Celia that summer of ’39.   Suddenly Jerry was coming at me out of a bank of ...”

“... It looks a picture of tranquillity, with a circle of red brick buildings around a village green. The walled compounds contain family houses, barns and stables; there is no way to tell if a house is Serb or Albanian. The dirt road from the village runs down to the Pristina-Pec highway, now controlled by the KLA. In one direction is Kjevo, where Serb ...”

“... confessed a wish to be a singer-songwriter. The boys would cruise around northern Delaware in the green 1972 Caprice Classic convertible their father bought them. Beau’s one youthful flaw was a lack of punctuality. Like his father, he was teetotal, except for a bit of social drinking in his twenties. Hunter was busted for possession of cocaine on the ...”

“... appears under a leather bag, ‘l’oiseau’ under an open corkscrew, ‘la table’ under a green leaf. Only a sponge is properly named (but then the sponge resembles other things too). Despite the psychoanalytic title – La Clef des songes in the (slightly different) original French – this word painting points less to Freud than to Saussure; it ...”