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“... times. First there were the startlingly sour Prytherch poems – still for me the ones that matter most – then the Welsh Nationalist phase, then the deus absconditus prayer-bout, then the vague musings about God as cosmic scientist, then the poems inspired by paintings, and so on. The drift throughout has been away from the carefully wrought ...”

“... In A.P. Herbert’s enjoyable parody of Shakespeare, Two Gentlemen of Soho, there is, I think – unfortunately I no longer possess a copy but had a small part in it at school – the passage: ‘Man, like a pebble on a glacier, moves imperceptibly but always down.’ A.P. Herbert was not being serious, of course, but his words apply to some, perhaps most, of us, mentally, morally and physically as we grow older ...”

“... Bunker Man and to Kathleen Jamie’s poetry collection The Queen of Sheba. It is insistent in W.N. Herbert’s poem ‘Featherhood’ and Janice Galloway’s Foreign Parts. It bridges writing as different as the poetry of Carol Ann Duffy, Kate Clanchy or David Kinloch, and the fiction of Christopher Whyte or A.L. Kennedy. Some of these poets and novelists are ...”

“... to Nietzsche by Cosima Wagner). True, Strauss’s book is vulgar and boring, and Professor Herbert Golder says so more than once in his introduction to Nietzsche’s essay: what he doesn’t say (nor, incidentally, does Nietzsche) is that Strauss’s book also contains some vicious attacks on the German working classes, their propensity to strikes and ...”

“... my father thought I was ugly.’ There is a kind of ego that tends to think ill of itself no matter what positive reinforcement it receives, and the young Christina Stead was probably afflicted with that kind of sensitivity; but it must have been exacerbated by her father’s hearty carelessness with jokes. Stead’s mother died when she was two and a ...”

“... of the so-called Old Testament had faith in God, but this does not mean that after debating the matter at a number of international conferences they decided to endorse the scientific hypothesis that there existed a supreme architect of the universe – even though, as Genesis reveals, they were of this opinion. They had faith in God in the sense that I have ...”

“... to become a nun.’ Later on, her two mentors were the ponderous and pedantic philosopher Herbert Spencer and Charles Booth the social investigator and a live wire who introduced her to the world of politics and philanthropy. But to neither could she give her heart. ‘I must pour my poor crooked thoughts into somebody’s heart,’ she wrote, aged ...”

“... the enthusiasm for strange metaphysical blendings, manifested by MacDiarmid’s early admirer Herbert Grierson. The Edinburgh professor’s work had recently prompted Eliot’s celebration of poetry censured by Dr Johnson for having ‘the most heterogeneous ideas ... yoked by violence together’. MacDiarmid’s determination to be ‘whaur extremes ...”

“... days ... passed undemandingly.’ For Margot, the welfare of the working classes was strictly a matter of convenience. Mrs Webb, who credited her with ‘intelligence and wit’ but ‘neither intellect nor wisdom’, was infuriated to hear Margot exclaim across a dinner table in 1903: ‘Why change the present state of things – all is well.’ Mrs ...”

“... to the left of the headword. Murray’s successors William Craigie and Charles Onions tussled over whether to maintain this practice. Proofs of the Supplement dated 11 September 1929 retain Murray’s so-called tramlines; in the next proofs, dated 2 July 1930, they are gone. Between these dates, Onions joined the BBC Advisory Committee on Spoken English, where he became acutely aware of the prejudices that led some people to stigmatise new or imported terms; tramlines, he felt, didn’t help ...”

“... in the world’, singling out ‘certain of our authors who, once they’ve given their subject-matter a good thump, declare that it naturally falls into two parts’ and spend the rest of their time playing one off against the other. Such insights are lost on the less than mercurial author of Reflections. Instead of trying to soften the antagonisms of the ...”

“... by bodily rigidity, swelling or trances, to psychological aberrations. Catholic scholars such as Herbert Thurston also attempted to explain a number of supposed miraculous occurrences such as stigmata or the incorruptibility of bodies after death as natural or artificially induced effects. For at least 150 years, chemists and biologists have delighted in ...”

“... music, and guess what? ‘Despite hours of practice, neither the conductor nor Herr Windt’ – Herbert Windt, the composer – was able to synchronise the music correctly ... So I myself took over the task of conducting the 80-man orchestra.’ Kleine Mich with oak leaves, swords and diamonds! She goes on to make the 1936 Olympics film, still reckoned to ...”

“... by David Attenborough as like Rommel taking command of the Eighth Army. The truth of this whole matter may, I suppose, be indefinitely hidden among rival conjectures, for it is evident from Tracey’s account that at least one person who should know how and why Wilson did what he did has had a lapse of memory. My conjecture is that the versions of Lords ...”

“... Heaney; and it is not a surprising selection, though to give Cowley four times as much space as Herbert is an unusual judgment, and the only canonical upset I can find in an anthology meant to be canonical. Wain had an easier start than Bennett, his fellow townsman, but the second stage was harder. No serious young writer in the Fifties could possibly be as ...”