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“... aggressive and tempestuous’ thanks to their provision of popular diversions. Charles Saumarez Smith is unimpressed by the diligent cataloguing in which curators have engaged. ‘It has been assumed to be adequate to assemble as much information as possible which appears to pertain directly to the original circumstances of an object’s production without ...”

“... uncreased prose – John Ashbery, James Merrill, A.R. Ammons, Amy Clampitt, Charles Simic, Dave Smith, Seamus Heaney, Louise Glück, Jorie Graham and Rita Dove. Vendler is in love with the lyric, indeed so in love with it that she befriends strangers who appear to resemble it: in her collection of review-essays, Soul Says, she converts all her chosen ...”

“... ink!), run "by the sort of men who called each other Wolly, Bunter, Biffy and Blinker. Mansfield Smith Cumming, the original ‘C.’, thought espionage ‘a capital sport’, and is memorably described by Phillip Knightley in his recently reissued study of 20th-century spying, The Second Oldest Profession:* He wore a gold-rimmed monocle, wrote only in ...”

“... stole the books that baffled me, the ones I couldn’t seem to solve. She was born Lula Carson Smith in Columbus, Georgia in 1917. Her father, Lamar Smith, was a jeweller who was forever tinkering with watches. Her mother, Marguerite, a more vivacious personality, had intended to name her baby Enrico Caruso and bragged ...”

“... with short useful bibliographies to take things farther. In Fifty European Novels Martin Seymour-Smith redeems himself for the awfulness of Novels and Novelists. He is a man of immense reading in several languages, and without aiming at critical profundity, a lively, vigorous and intelligent commentator on all that he has read. Fifty European Novels begins ...”

“... the town where he was despised for being poor (his father is a brain-damaged waiter) and reclaim Anne, his high-school sweetheart, who promised to wait for him. He wants to avenge the class prejudice he has suffered – ‘I will kill them, I will drag them through the shit, I will make them eat shit’ – but his return descends into black comedy. ...”

“... 1958, eating a slice of toast with butter and strawberry jam before going to teach her class at Smith, she spotted the mailman with ‘a handful of flannel: circulars – soap-coupons, Sears sales, a letter from mother of stale news she’d already relayed over the phone, a card from Oscar Williams inviting us to a cocktail party in New York on the ...”

“... and there is no book on the modern British monarchy comparable in scholarly stature to Denis Mack Smith on the Kings of Italy. Dorothy Thompson’s study of Queen Victoria is thus the more to be welcomed, for she is a writer in a very different tradition from such conventional courtly biographers as Elizabeth Longford, Cecil Woodham-...”

“... golden in the sun.’ Park Hill, designed by the Smithson-influenced architects Jack Lynn and Ivor Smith, is now the largest listed building in Europe, and as he trolls about the Sheffield streets Hatherley is struck again and again by the ‘sublime scale’ of this humungous housing development and the way the stepped blocks slip-slide away over the contours ...”

“... of clothes and manners, foods and amusements of society than the perpetual political crises’. Anne de Courcy’s Margot at War is lighter in tone and lacks scholarly pretensions or apparatus. But it conveys Margot’s milieu with a nice touch and takes time away from this enclosed self-regarding world to give us vivid and sharp vignettes of the harder ...”

“... just with reference to Peru. In her tempestuous tenure at the World Bank in the early Eighties, Anne Krueger insisted that her staff try to calculate the ‘transaction cost’ of economic activity in poor countries, the ‘rents’, as some economists think of them, that bureaucrats exact for their permissions, and the time and money lost in getting ...”

“... employees at their UFO-shaped building near San Jose. Great idea, they replied. We talked to Anne Wojcicki, the CEO of the consumer genetics company 23andMe, who said her company could provide us with saliva collection kits. At one point it seemed as though the entire West Coast genomics community was on the same Slack workspace (I counted more than a ...”

“... uncanny predictions, like Auden’s, and deaths where poets lost their words first, like Stevie Smith after her stroke. There are disappearing acts (Weldon Kees) and changes of identity (Rosemary Tonks). The smoke of incinerated diaries – and, in Tonks’s case, a novel she claimed was the best thing she ever wrote – still hangs over some deaths. Some ...”

“... forward and look round me at him, smile to herself and sit back again.’ When George’s daughter Anne was born in 1919 and son Michael in 1921, the sisters became enthusiastic babysitters and general chroniclers of their brother’s household. ‘I think George enjoys the thrill she gets when she gives her name in shops,’ Lolly wrote. ‘Mrs ...”

“... Protective Services group homes. Button Sanchez murdered a college student for no reason. Serenity Smith is a trans woman who gets transferred from the men’s unit, not without some resistance from a faction of gender bigots in Stanville. Betty LaFrance is a death-row inmate who hired a hit man to kill the hit man she hired to kill her husband. Candy Peña is ...”