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“... alone are certain good.’ And then I began to wonder where I could find such a book. Helen Vendler’s long study of the art of Shakespeare’s Sonnets, is that purely aesthetic study of poetic language in action, and it begins appropriately with this statement: ‘I assume that a poem is not an essay, and that its paraphrasable prepositional ...”

“... is a message somewhere about, though it is not quite clear what or for whom. Nocturnes for the King of Naples is a tastefully confected morsel in the American-decadent mode. The hero is a fading beauty in his twenties, recalling the time of passion and fulfilment when he was 17 and the accepted loved one of an older man. He is the child of hopelessly rich ...”

“... to cause trouble in the school of Laon, Abelard comes back to Paris, perhaps under the auspices of King Louis’s chancellor Stephen de Garlande, to set up his own school in the cloister of Notre Dame. He becomes famous as the wizard of logic, launches the logical rage that was to govern or misgovern the next four centuries of the intellectual history of the ...”

“... snobbish about its Dutch origins and its tulip festival, and named after our least successful king, James II, when he was Duke of York and Albany. One year, when I told friends in Manhattan that I was going to Albany to hear the hippy, marijuana-influenced poems of a Londoner who was living with another poet, half-Negro and half-Cherokee, the New York ...”

“... da Vinci is said to have made, which walked and opened its breast to offer its heart to the king of France. When clockwork was cutting-edge technology moving figures were taken seriously; as it became commonplace it was relegated to the world of novelty, of singing birds and dancing dolls, and finally to toys, all of which, as Penelope Curtis writes in ...”

“... does not marry Nausicaa, and Penelope is virtuous. But this isn’t the case with Clytemnestra or Helen in the poem, nor will it be the case with Emma Bovary, Anna Karenina or Molly Bloom. We recognise ourselves in Homer’s poem, we can agree with Hall, because we’ve been there before in the works it continues to spin off. Hall organises her book into ...”

“... determine its size and shape, its character and its content, and they deserve our attention. When Helen Vendler begins her recent book on Seamus Heaney, for example, ‘I am grateful to Seamus Heaney, first and foremost, for all the invaluable poetry and prose that he has added to the store of literature in English,’ you can be fairly sure that she’s not ...”

“... or Drobny (to say nothing of Agassi’s erstwhile brother-in-law Gonzales) could have taken the King of Las Vegas handily, his amazing speed, anticipation and racket control notwithstanding. The core of championship tennis has always been the attacking, i.e. serve and volley game. Ground strokes were important for opening up the court, making an approach to ...”

“... world of Realpolitik ‘decentred’: it was centred on the absolutist monarch to the point of sun-king mystification). Bradshaw is good at seeing how far Ulysses’s ‘rational’ use of traditional ideas is guided by ulterior political aims. And he convincingly shows that Thersites’s nihilism is neatly undercut, that he is a Nietzschean Mr Foolhardy in ...”

“... New Englander, twenty years younger than himself. Their family consisted of three girls – Helen, the indulged Rosamond, Beatrix – and, at long last, the boy John. Their children’s talents must have been partly, at least, inherited, but no trace of their father Rude’s jolly German Kameradschaft seems to have been passed on. Adrian Wright has been ...”

“... of ‘cutting snow’, even in June. This is a land of ‘fear and shock’ where the buzzard is king: He soars and he hovers, rocking on his wings, He scans his wide parish with a sharp eye, He catches the trembling of small hidden things, He tears them to pieces, dropping them from the sky.Yet ‘this is my country,’ the last stanza begins, ‘beloved by ...”

“... obsesses minor poets,’ Walcott has written, and not just minor poets, but major critics too – Helen Vendler has accused Walcott of ventriloquism.) His genius may be intermittent and may have taken a long time to emerge – his best work doesn’t begin until 1973, with the publication of his fourth collection, the autobiographical Another Life – but ...”

“... Right, as there would have been if the targets were Libyans or Cubans or (best of all) ‘drug king-pins’. Every now and then, the American Jewish Committee or the Anti-Defamation League or Morris Dees’s heroic Klanwatch outfit would issue a report, warning of the weed-like growth of ostensibly anti-tax militias who also sold Mein Kampf and inveighed ...”

“... it may be in the interest of the most venerable institutions of the state that they should do so. King Henry V is all the better for having been Prince Hal, but no woman could propose to imitate the sun (or the moon?) and allow the base contagious clouds to smother up her virtue and beauty from the world in order that her charms should shine out all the more ...”

“... rather like the laws of physics. The mystery of the Universe’s origins is not so much how, pace King Lear, something could have come of nothing, since a random fluctuation in a quantum field might have popped an inflatable particle into fleeting existence, but rather where the quantum field itself might have come from. Or is to raise such a question merely ...”