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“... after Victor Hugo Two bullets to the head, the child had taken. It was a clean, honest, humble, quiet place. In blessing, above a portrait, hung a palm cross. His aged granny stood there, trembling, lost. In silence, we removed his clothes. His mouth hung open, pale, the eye-life drowned in death. Each arm fell useless from its socket ...”

“... write his hugely popular romance The Last Days of Pompeii (published in 1834, not 1866 as Rosalind Williams erroneously informs us). Once Lytton had woken the ‘City of the Dead’ to what he called a ‘second existence’, it was no longer necessary to visit the Naples area in order to relive the most catastrophic moment in its history. By the end of the ...”

“... is small, but that is the case with almost all the contributors with good poems included here – Hugo Williams, Anne Stevenson, Carol Rumens, Andrew Motion. The exceptions, who compose naturally in a more spacious sequence, are James Fenton and of course Seamus Heaney himself. Heaney, in collaboration with Ted Hughes, has produced a most agreeable ...”

“... One event dominated Tennessee Williams’s life: his sister Rose’s bilateral prefrontal lobotomy, performed on 13 January 1943, two years before The Glass Menagerie, the play he forged from her condition, was first produced. He rarely mentions the lobotomy in his private notebooks, the fragmented daybooks which he kept for much of his life, and which have now been edited, with sumptuous photographic and biographical supplementation, by Margaret Bradham Thornton, to whom devotees of Williams should be grateful ...”

“... were that keen. ‘Oh God, not another fucking elf!’ the English lecturer and long-time Inkling Hugo Dyson cried. John Wain, an attendee at meetings in the late 1940s, described his heart sinking as Tolkien appeared at Lewis’s door with a bulging jacket pocket, yet again. Tolkien looked down on Lewis’s Narnia, which he thought had been created with ...”

“... Benn’s 1963-67 diaries and Hilary Wainwright’s Labour: A Tale of Two Parties) and ‘Raymond Williams and E.P. Thompson’. The first began, I imagine, simply as a critique of the Bennite Left and ended (famously) as a critique of Neil Kinnock. It argued that the political judgments and electoral sociology upon which the Bennites had based their ...”

“... my own poems in the magazine.Subsequently other people became stalwarts of a kind, didn’t they? Hugo Williams?Oh, they came in. David Harsent was another.Peter Dale?I think we published some of his poems. He never became quite one of the gang. There was a certain amount of indecision about him then. David Harsent appeared from nowhere. I think via the ...”

“... makes you think you are infallible, or your writing becomes puffed out with self-esteem. (Victor Hugo thought himself superior to both Jesus and Shakespeare.) It is a complication that the imagination can well do without.’ It is the spring of 1993. Gunn is on the list of those who will read at a literary festival in a huge old market building in the centre ...”

“... in the footsteps of Tony Harrison’s Continuous, Craig Raine’s Rich, Paul Muldoon’s Quoof and Hugo Williams’s Letters Home, all of which voyage round the paterfamilias: that tradition is much more pious and affectionate. The Williams offers the closest comparison: it too is about an overbearing writer-father and ...”

“... of the highly successful Hazell series by the (again) pseudonymous P.B. Yuill (in fact, Gordon Williams and football manager Terry Venables writing as a team: the significance of the bizarre surname eludes me). The author of Duffy is Julian Barnes, assistant literary editor of the Sunday Times and television critic of the New Statesman, and formerly ...”

“... bizarre press conference where she paraded her whole Cabinet jammed together side by side – in Hugo Young’s savage phrase, a row of ‘tight-assed men hoping to have a “good war” ’ – to her improvisation of an opt-out policy for state schools which was obviously new to her Secretary of State, to her spirited defence of her own right to have ...”

“... had silenced it for generations.’ Not quite true, as it happens. In the mid-Eighties, Hugo Young did a radio programme on the law. Hailsham, the then Lord Chancellor, would not waive the rules, but Lord Templeman, a law lord who was effectively beyond his reach, went on the programme anyway and broke the taboo, which Mackay abandoned when he took ...”

“... would later give Enninful the nod at Vogue. After Calvin Klein came Dolce and Gabbana, Jil Sander, Hugo Boss, Comme des Garçons, Christian Dior, Giorgio Armani, Lanvin and Valentino. Over the course of his career, Enninful has built a remarkable number of close relationships with the rich, famous and powerful.With so many people moving freely between the two ...”

“... the same passion for L.B.,’ Liszt wrote to Countess Marie d’Agoult, his first mistress. ‘Hugo called Virgil the moon of Homer; when I flatter myself, I tell myself that I shall perhaps one day be B’s.’ I like to think, mostly on the basis of conservatory gossip but also because of the ‘physical aversion’ to women Liszt keeps mentioning in his ...”

“... to the point of view he wanted to put over. He revered Notre Dame de Paris, convinced that Victor Hugo had succeeded in embodying in the figure of Quasimodo the downtrodden French peasant’s awakening thirst for justice, truth and progress. In one of his Vremya articles he extravagantly praised Pushkin’s fragment in poetry and prose, ‘Egyptian ...”