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“... well-made plays, packed with schematic clichés and mechanical ironies. Of course, we could always read the thematic material as camouflage, as literary garnish to what’s essentially just a thumping good read. But that would be a little unfair to Boyd – especially when his new novel, Any Human Heart, struggles earnestly ...”

“... of its publication at the time, because surely I would have loved it then as I love it now: I have read few books of such wide and delightful appeal. There is a rare wholeness about The Book of Ebenezer Le Page. You get the entire man, in a way that isn’t usually within the gift of literature to procure. It is ‘the book of’ in the prosaic sense that ...”

“... of sirens.’ Sebald, Professor of Modern German Literature at the University of East Anglia, had read that the skull of Sir Thomas Browne, antiquary, lover of mysteries, connoisseur of odds and ends, was kept in the museum of that same hospital. He failed to find it, or the museum, and it turned out that the skull had subsequently been buried with the rest ...”

“... places. The sequences featuring three eventually famous friends, James Prior of Northern Ireland, Peter May of England, one of its cricket captains, and William Rees-Mogg, late of the Times, are among the tightest and funniest things he has written. May is present, while utterly silent, as a batsman of genius, and as a figure of fun and a pillar of rectitude ...”

“... During his summation at the Old Bailey trial of Peter Sutcliffe, Mr Justice Boreham felt called upon to remind the jury that they were there to judge Sutcliffe, not the flock of psychiatrists called to testify as to his mental condition. The jury could have been forgiven for believing that psychiatry, not Sutcliffe, was in the dock, for during the trial, the profession and its discourse were subjected to merciless inquisition ...”

“... was the life and soul of the party, observant of every detail. Food was bought on the way ... Peter Pears and Britten would often give her [Princess Mary] a small, private recital, just half a dozen Schubert songs that were then in their repertory – not too taxing for anybody. Still, there is inevitably some matter in the book, and until Donald ...”

“... Walcott’s extravagance of poetic diction and tendency to verbosity off-putting in the past’ (Peter Porter); ‘I feel that the fuss and the language are not quite justified by the donné’ (Roy Fuller). Derek Walcott has suffered, perhaps more than any other contemporary poet writing in English, from accusations that his work is too showy. Some of the ...”

“... her recollection of works by Marco Evaristti, Cornelia Parker, Vito Acconci (this is a book to be read with Wikipedia open beside you); it has a list of artworks at the back – a glossary of the mental museum Frankie carries around. ‘Now that I am no longer a student of any kind,’ she tells us, ‘I must take responsibility for the furniture inside my ...”

“... with aborted Englands, Hughes elegises the life-force and the poetry force. It is hard not to read the title-poem, which invokes his most dispirited caged beast to date, as an ironic allegory of poet and audience: Children’s gazings Have tattered him to a lumpish Comfort of woolly play-wolf. Wry quotation from earlier poems may imply that the Hughes ...”

“... harsh and rivalrous times, in learning that others have been there before. But it’s important to read Bottigheimer to understand how originality is itself only a moral claim, legitimising inherent, occluded judgments. In ‘The Three Feathers’, one of Peter Redgrove’s variations on the Grimms, written for Radio 4, the ...”

“... rap for the exquisite but evil Margot Beste-Chetwynde, and reflects onthe undeniable cogency of Peter Beste-Chetwynde’s ‘You can’t see Mamma in prison, can you?’ The more Paul considered this, the more he perceived it to be the statement of a natural law. He appreciated the assumption of comprehension with which ...”

“... which correspond to a little less than half of the published text: 44 per cent, according to Peter Davison’s estimate. These have now been published in an opulent edition: the right-hand pages of the book give a full-size photograph of the material, the left-hand pages contain Professor Davison’s transcription, laboriously deciphered, the cancellings ...”

“... German: after some years I received a cheque for about £4.) I was surprised, a few days ago, to read somewhere a description of myself as ‘a heavily subsidised author’. Don’t almost all authors subsidise their writing by doing other jobs? Actually (and I don’t care if it sounds like boasting), I no longer have to subsidise my writing, which does ...”

“... of freedom under the communists. It is also true that Teilhard de Chardin is a rather easier read than Dobzhansky and that Husserl, Lyotard and Lévi-Strauss have had the advantage of a good introduction, represented as they are by influential and eloquent Czech followers. Among 67 non-fiction books released in Prague and recently listed in a literary ...”

“... surface. An enormous dried sunflower is attached, inverted, in the centre of the canvas. Peter Schjeldahl saw an ‘energetic contradiction of the frontal and the recessive’ in these works, which he compares to the paintings of Jackson Pollock. He refers to the sense of being caught between diving into the image, drawn into the perspectival ...”