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“... doubt the dominant figure within Sinn Féin – ‘the most important Irish Republican since Michael Collins’, as Sharrock and Devenport put it – his character, history and intentions are crucially important. What we need to know is what the authors ask in their title: is he a peacemaker or a warmonger? Gerry Adams was born in West Belfast in October ...”

“... in his twenties. Towards the end of the decade he moved from Warwickshire to London, where he met Michael Moorcock, then the editor of the science fiction magazine New Worlds. Harrison took over from Moorcock soon afterwards, and remained at the helm until 1975, during which time New Worlds became associated with the experimental current in science fiction ...”

“... he ever completely forgets about us.’ Always, always, ever, in this eloquent translation by Michael Hofmann. She knows how it is with fathers: Sometimes my father loves us, and sometimes he doesn’t. When he doesn’t, we can’t do anything about it, my mother and me . . . Any steps we might take only have the effect of delaying even more the time ...”

“... her flat so she could watch Neil Jordan’s biopic about the nationalist politician and guerrilla Michael Collins. In the closing sequence, Collins’s fiancée, Kitty, buys her wedding dress, Michael is assassinated by anti-Treatyites in the wilds of County Cork, and Sinead O’Connor sings ‘She Moves through the ...”

“... it. The origins of the so-called ‘set’ lay in Milner’s ‘Kindergarten’, the bunch of young men, mostly from New College, Oxford, whom Lord Milner summoned or took with him to rebuild South Africa after the Boer War. With their mission completed by the foundation of the Union of South Africa, they returned to England but maintained some cohesion ...”

“... at the time of its submission a Syndic of the Press, and Watson was very rude to me, the publisher Michael Black preferred not to submit a proposal to the Syndicate. I hope and believe this is not true, and that Black, a serious Leavisian with whom I was quite genially associated for a good many years, knew me well enough to understand that such a ...”

“... such excellent studies in the accurately entitled Literary Lives series (published by Palgrave) as Michael O’Neill’s Percy Bysshe Shelley (1989) or Caroline Franklin’s Byron (2000), not-very-literary biographies, some running to four hundred and more pages, continue to accumulate in the bookshops. There (presumably) they attract readers far more ...”

“... on the news?’ asked the late comedian Bill Hicks in one of his most famous routines. ‘Today, a young man on acid realised that all matter is merely energy condensed to a slow vibration – that we are all one consciousness experiencing itself subjectively, there’s no such thing as death, life is only a dream, and we’re the imagination of ...”

“... note for the recent National Theatre production of The Revenger’s Tragedy, and its angry young author is further imagined as an early avatar of John Osborne. But it is Hals, with his fondness for exaggerated quirks of character and his unabashed relish of bourgeois vulgarity, who provides the best equivalent for the aspect of Middleton’s art that ...”

“... Together with the Dukes of Albemarle and Somerset he killed a beadle who ventured to oppose the young men in a brothel, and some of the King’s Horse Guards, of whom he was captain, slit the nose of Sir John Coventry. (This might have been construed as loyalty to his father on the part of Monmouth, for when a tax on playhouses was objected to in the House ...”

“... their leopard spots, lay grounded as numb as scrolls of candied grapefruit peel. I saw myself as a young newt, neurasthenic, scarlet and wild in the wild coffee-coloured water. (‘Dunbarton’) This curves – scrolls – with animation. It easily – almost naturally – encompasses the contradictory pairings of ‘umber yellow’ and ...”

“... through discovering the world:They walk without turning back … Had the mature Goethe met the young Goethe at a crossroads, he might actually have failed to recognise him and might have sought to make his acquaintance … Poets with history are, above all, poets of a theme. We always know what they are writing about … Rarely are they pure lyricists ...”

“... soon every scrap of paper that survived the purges at Max Gate will have been through the mill. Michael Millgate calls his new edition of the biography ‘The Life and Work of Thomas Hardy by Thomas Hardy’. Since he has stripped it of the thin marital disguise of his wife’s name and cleared it of Florence’s editorial emendations carried out after ...”

“... I know if he’d seen anything exciting: ‘The only people who are excited are the ones selling young adult vampires.’ At a booth marked THE GOVERNMENT BELIEVES IN GOD – WHY DON’T YOU? a preacher was flanked by two young women in white spandex bodysuits with wings on their backs. More angels were roaming the ...”

“... of Oxbridge intellectuals in the present-day Labour Party. It isn’t just a matter of ambitious young graduates from Oxford and Cambridge losing interest in a party which hasn’t looked like an election winner for some years. At least as important is the attitude of the rank-and-file activists who choose the Party’s Parliamentary candidates. If the age ...”