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“... from Stockport, Cheshire, who were commissioned to re-create the scenes that the TV man John McCarthy would have missed during his captivity. Employed by the same organisation as McCarthy’s friend Jill Morrell, I was asked by the children to pass on a collection of their work to her. One picture had been painted by a boy called Timothy, who was ...”

“... In ‘A Wave’, the title-poem of his new collection, John Ashbery says, among many other things: One idea is enough to organise a life and project it Into unusual but viable forms, but many ideas merely Lead one thither into a morass of their own good intentions. The reference to ‘one idea’ recalls the passage in ‘Esthétique du Mal’ where Wallace Stevens dismisses                                      the lunatic of one idea         In a world of ideas, who would have all the people Live, work, suffer and die in that idea In a world of ideas ...”

“... McEwan, I tried to call you on the radio telephone, when our old flatmate, John Webb, fell overboard in a gale off the coast of Long Island a few years ago and was nearly swept south to Bermuda. But the old Oxford number had been disconnected, and your publisher told me that you were ‘indisputably a hugely important literary phenomenon’ and not taking any calls ...”

“... it adversity, that such beauty does exist.’ Baraka made the observation in his liner notes to John Coltrane’s album Live at Birdland, which includes ‘Alabama’, an elegy for the four girls murdered in the 1963 Birmingham Church bombing.I thought of Baraka’s words at New York’s Riverside Church last Saturday, at the funeral of the alto saxophonist ...”

“... John Updike’s unfailing geniality and fluent industry appear to get on a fair number of nerves, of which he’s slyly aware. (Is there anything he isn’t slyly aware of? That foxy grin conceals volumes.) When Updike was but a sprig, apprenticing at the New Yorker and carving out a little piece of Pennsylvania as his literary duchy, his gleaming facility was found suspect by some detractors, its satin finish the imposture of a fair-haired boy out to impress his elders with the fine flick of his exquisite perceptions and deflective modesty ...”

“... as £168,000 from English copyrights. Another work that made a great deal of money in England was John Stainer’s The Crucifixion, first performed in 1887, and unmentioned by Pahlen. Called into question time and time again both for its ‘inane’ libretto and its patchy music, it was nonetheless described by one contemporary reviewer as ...”

“... earliest known writing system, the wedge-shaped characters marking out syllables produced by a cut reed pressed into moist clay (the Latin for ‘wedge’ is cuneus). The tablet dates from the seventh century BCE; it’s a fragment of the Epic of Gilgamesh, a poem that is even older, about the adventures of the historical king of Uruk, who ruled in the 27th ...”

“... got an order to report to Major Thorold Dickinson (director of Gaslight in civilian life). Carol Reed and Peter Ustinov had been likewise commandeered, and the little group were told to produce a film to boost the British troops’ flagging morale. It was made, then aborted as subversive by the War Office; enough influential people had liked it, however, to ...”

“... of my childhood. 10 February. Finish with some regret Frances Spalding’s book on the Pipers, John and Myfanwy, the latter figuring in The Habit of Art where she is to some extent disparaged. I’ve always been in two minds about Piper, liking him when I was young with his paintings ‘modern’ but representational enough to be acceptable, a view I ...”

“... and a voice as well as a writer. A guest list for a Features party planned in 1951 included Henry Reed, Lawrence Durrell. Christopher Fry, C. Day Lewis, Lennox Berkeley, Michael Tippett, William Walton, Laurie Lee and Stevie Smith. Until the early Fifties the BBC appeared to get a good return from its policy of patronising highbrow talent. From the ...”

“... enterprise has not failed to show itself in the most favourable light. Thus in the Crimea Uncle John has carried his railroads with him, and the locomotive is used there to wheel up shot, shell and other implements of war … from the camp in the Crimea, to the War Office in London, the Commander in Chief now reports direct the state of the siege every few ...”

“... of something fairly robust in the artist’s character. He was a foot-fetishist. The New York poet John Giorno, an old boyfriend of the bewigged one, gave an account several years ago of what his pal liked to do on his nights in. Just to get you in the mood, here’s his account of what he and Andy did on the day ...”

“... microfilm to a ‘race war’ he knew nothing about. He pursued the subject in a senior thesis at Reed College in faraway Oregon and in graduate school at Duke in not much closer North Carolina. In 1982 he published Death in a Promised Land, a pioneering account that remains the starting point for anyone learning about the massacre. The work did not gain a ...”

“... courts to intervene where an arguable misuse of power affects the public as a whole is, as Lord Reed said in the Supreme Court recently, an aspect of their function (and, one might add, that of the Lord Chancellor) of protecting the rule of law. Departments of state have on occasion welcomed public interest challenges as a means of clarifying the law. In ...”

“... melancholic Mrs Joan Drake, who fell about when paid a professional visit by the famous divine John Dod because he reminded her of the character of Ananias in The Alchemist. Lake turns the story around. It was because Dod with his great beard and upturned eyes really existed that Jonson was able to put him into his play, even if disguised as a separatist ...”