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“... of school prizes down the generations of the wonders that had been, and perhaps today inspiring Andrew Motion to perform a similar service for that Dome. But, with all that said, life after 1851 went on as unregenerately as before. The ‘dignity of Labour’ had been much talked of, but only the happy horny-handed few were making ships, locomotives ...”

“... or ‘seem to’ confirm the accuracy of his claims. Following the references, we find that Andrew Motion speculates that ‘Keats may have gone to brothels in Oxford and London’, and that Kenneth Johnston draws attention to ‘the realities of Cambridge between 1787 and 1791’ while Wordsworth was there. So there was a lot of it about. Wu’s ...”

“... Northern Irish poetry during the last twenty-five or thirty years. Ever since Blake Morrison and Andrew Motion gave the primacy of this work semi-official status in The Penguin Anthology of Contemporary British Poetry, the question has been what gives Northern Irish poets their edge. Many reasons have been advanced for the phenomenon: Ireland’s verbal ...”

“... lowered. Wholly and proudly conventional writers and critics, such as Ruth Padel, Fiona Sampson, Andrew Motion and Peter McDonald, have found positive things to say. Last year Prynne received a Society of Authors award. The publication of the collected Poems in 1999, an ever fattening volume updated in 2005 and again last year, each time gathering in ...”

“... stretched from Hardy through to Larkin and Hughes, and to Hughes’s successor as poet laureate, Andrew Motion, whose first critical book was a study of Thomas (though this genealogy had to overlook his Welsh ancestry, and the fact that it took an American’s urgings and practice to get him writing poetry at all). Longley grumbles about the ...”

“... and, in retrospect, boring and pointless: all that matters is that the management and our editor, Andrew Neil, told us nothing of their true intentions. By contrast, the crisis itself was simple. Rupert Murdoch demanded a level of compulsory redundancies of his Sogat 82 and NGA employees that he knew they would not accept. The two unions took the bait and on ...”

“... was told to keep quiet at that time by one of Epstein’s friends, but she didn’t: she filed a motion not only naming Epstein as her abuser but claiming she’d also been told to have sex with his friends Prince Andrew and Alan Dershowitz. Who were the ‘potential co-conspirators’ granted immunity under the Florida ...”

“... arriving first at the Aquatics Centre designed by Zaha Hadid – a giant wave sustained by its own motion. On either side of the wave there are temporary boxes for rows of spectators’ seating which will be taken down once the Games are over. We crane our necks to see the top of the building, whose vinyl skin appears to ripple in the breeze. The shape of the ...”

“... of a poet as someone who was worth the price of the clothes he stood in (Simon Armitage, £ 1055; Andrew Motion, £ 953; Glynn Maxwell, £520 – all totals excluding underwear). Villon, CHASCUN LE SCET, would have been unable to resist a flutter on the fate of his soul by offering to model everything, then nothing, in a centre-page ...”

“... Blair’s latest consensus hair policy, Lord Archer’s ironic, pre-penitentiary crop, the way Andrew Motion carries off his loden coat as he swirls between taxi and station platform. Julian Barnes’s novels are depilated at source, fat-free. Frisking them for a Moorcockian digression, a set of cellulite-heavy parentheses, would be like checking a ...”

“... that Peter Saville is the only English graphic artist to have had an actor play him in a major motion picture. The film, 24 Hour Party People, was entertaining in the way that films full of intense people with good accents and daft haircuts always are, and Saville comes off quite well, the genius of the piece in fact, which is probably saying quite a ...”

“... reminded his readers that the great Kepler had long before identified vital patterns in planets’ motion: their elliptical paths with the Sun at their focus, the mathematical regularities which governed their orbital speeds. Newton himself was never quite so generous in honouring his predecessors. Others, including Halley and his London colleague, the ...”

“... and returned to their balconies, rusting rails and anti-gull devices, become the watchers. A slow-motion cinema of such tender boredom that they will never move again. Along the seafront they come, the ordinary eccentrics, the premature revenants. The hoop-backed old woman with the doll-child in an ancient pram. The naked man wrapped in his inadequate ...”

“... been digitally remastered? Are we an experiment that happens to be falling apart, a scheme set in motion by forces outside our reckoning?’The answer must be yes. In the novels up to and including Underworld, DeLillo provided wonders of radical talk and comic invention, souped-up engines of media examination and exposures of capitalist reality. In that great ...”

“... than the original: to the viewer, her queen is a vividly shy person who must watch in slow motion as her limitations are swamped by demands. Foy shows enormous subtlety in capturing the way fear and inexperience may bake, under the correct conditions, into a nearly impeccable hauteur, but the overall effect will be to remind people of Elizabeth II’s ...”