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“... In 1865, a year after John Clare’s death in the Northampton General Lunatic Asylum, Frederick Martin, a former amanuensis of Thomas Carlyle, published the first biography of the ‘peasant poet’. It laid the foundations, Jonathan Bate says in his new Life, ‘for both the enduring myths and some of the key truths about Clare ...”

“... in her arms and hold. Their branches that are grinding Madly together and together, It is no real fire They are breaking each other. Often I think I should be like The single tree, going nowhere. Since my own arm could not and would not Break the other. Yet by my broken bones I tell new weather. How neatly and unobtrusively the verb ...”

“... full of attacking wizardry but suspect in defence. In other words, too good for their own good. No wonder we like them, as Kingsley Amis used to say, though not of course re soccer. On paper, certainly, with their expensive foreign stars, both teams ought to have done better in the Premiership contest, what we used to call the League. Chelsea, as I ...”

“... man, after being forced to strip naked and wash in a common bath, is locked up in a tiny cell with no furniture, where he is given the regulation supper of ½ lb of gruel and 8 oz of bread. In the morning he has to pay for it by staying in the cell and breaking up a half ton of granite with a hammer or picking four pounds of oakum. It is very hard work on very ...”

“... her, in the words of Pelléas: ‘Vous êtes belle.’ She dismissed him, saying they were both no more than children, and for the next eight years, during which he never saw her, she was his Mélisande, and (transferred to the deep country) the Yvonne de Galais of Le Grand Meaulnes, which was published in 1913. Meanwhile, Fournier – he used the pen-name ...”

“... to rise during the period of suspense that ends just before the grand dinner at Stationers’ Hall; the winner gets an extra bonus of more sales; and the sponsors presumably do at least as well out of the enterprise as they would by spending the same amount of cash on cricket or golf. Although Booker has a financial stake in some best-selling ...”

“... begun to doubt ever existed. The stamp was discovered in 1931 and in that same year vanished. ‘No one in New Zealand is known to have seen it, let alone possess a copy,’ wrote the philatelist Jim Brodie in an article for the NZ Stamp Collector in 1974. The most important 20th-century New Zealand stamp had gone ...”

“... John Lubbock, Liberal MP and social reformer (he introduced the bank holiday into law in 1871), was also the founding father of scientific anthropology and an obsessive entomologist. Of his many books, the most successful, Ants, Bees and Wasps, ran to 18 editions. In 1872, he presented a wasp that he had tamed (allegedly) to the annual meeting of the British Association for the Advancement of Science ...”

“... Osborne writes, he was ‘widely regarded as among the few really great poets of the century’. No slur on the century seems intended here: part of what we mean by talking of great poets is that there are never very many of them about. But Mr Osborne goes on to mention that the poets Larkin and Gunn refused to kneel to the new collection. Larkin said of ...”

“... write a novel without a catastrophic turning point, or a shattering final twist. That for once no one should be involved in a freak ballooning accident, or be brained by a glass table, or be wrongly convicted of a country-house rape; that no one should experience a marriage-ending bout of premature ejaculation, or have ...”

“... fugitive publications … The audience was only a handful, mostly other writers. There would be no reviews or prizes or job offers. No agents ringing up. No photo on the dust-jacket looking earnest or seductive. There was no dust-jacket. I did it ...”

“... lord now of the isle’, gets short shrift. ‘Caliban’ is a poem that performs thought. It has no story to tell, and shows negligible interest in the plot of The Tempest. What we are given instead is a long examination of Caliban’s last utterance: ‘I’ll be wise hereafter, and seek for grace.’ Browning turns Caliban into a muddy embodiment of ...”

“... shattering and glassy, all daggers and plans, while the woman in the wheelchair across the hall from my father’s room in the nursing home struggled all day to untangle an invisible ball of string, or some other endlessly tangled thing. Kasischke’s people are breakable or broken, tangled up with one another, unable to stand alone. Any page of Where ...”

“... out herds bred over centuries in Wales. Small farmers, whelped on Common Market subsidies and John Constable idylls, were being priced out of existence by agribusiness and Tesco. In time, the three of us – Karl, Seamus and me – decided to go out there partly to see what we could see but also as a way of spending time in company with people who shared ...”

“... just one, but virtually two generations older, since between us lay those – the cohort of Stuart Hall or Raphael Samuel – who had co-founded the New Left, from beginnings in the Fifties rather than the Forties. His looks assisted the illusion, the handsome features at once melodramatically mobile and geologically deep-set, a landscape of wild scarp and ...”