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“... started on the poem in earnest: Grey eyes. Lips like coals aglow. Her face was a tinted mask of snow. He began, quite rightly, to worry about this. ‘Not so good, I thought.’ Then he remembered Frost, who ‘took a dim view of “poetical” phraseology, and pretentious purple passages made him wince’. March then found some lines which don’t recall ...”

“... reading for our time,’ Margaret Atwood proclaimed in a New York Times review of Snow, Pamuk’s grim, Dostoevskian thriller about Islamists and secularists clashing in north-eastern Turkey. (‘Headscarves to Die for’ was the headline.) Pamuk’s appeal has not been lost on politicians. Daniel Cohn-Bendit has credited Pamuk with helping ...”

“... strove for a better understanding of the Revolution were mainly Communist sympathisers like Edgar Snow, Anna Louise Strong and Owen Lattimore. After the gruesomeness of the war in Korea, their expertise was at a discount and the State Department was purged of the sort of people who might, if they had stuck around, have helped avert the inane policies that ...”

“... fleeting but unmistakable, is a reminiscence of the ending of Joyce’s ‘The Dead’ with its snow falling ‘as the descent of their last end, upon all the living and the dead’. Other endings in late Beckett echo the final sentence of another Dubliners story, ‘A Painful Case’, in which we are told of Mr Duffy that ‘He felt that he was ...”

“... sleigh bells in the frosty dark and the shadows of holly wreaths thrown by lighted windows on the snow.’ The place sounds, not accidentally, like the setting of Welles’s Magnificent Ambersons or Minelli’s Meet me in St Louis. This is the West not as the future or the frontier, but as the unspoiled past, the impeccable past of nostalgia, not a snowflake ...”

“... for the grotesque – as if he had abandoned Wilde for George Eliot but had found only C. P. Snow. Martha, for example, one of the archaeologists, is a large and ‘deceptively jolly’ woman who manages to sound pleasant and cheerful while sowing discreet seeds of discord all over the place. This is an interesting gift, as Ackroyd says, but Martha ...”

“... When he came to write his autobiography, the biographer Michael Holroyd decided to restrict himself to what he calls ‘a good walk-on part’, assigning the leading roles to his family. Avowedly happier with the lives of others than with his own, he remains as close as the circumstance permits to the condition of invisible watcher ...”

“... Hart Davis’s history of the Daily Telegraph under the Berry family, and of the second volume of Michael Wharton’s autobiography. Hart-Davis was a fairly junior member of the Telegraph’s staff for some years. As the author of the ‘Peter Simple’ column for thirty-odd years, Wharton must be regarded as immortal. As far as I know, I never met ...”

“... of the Man of Letters, for this was trespassing on Queenie Leavis’s territory. The attack on Snow is too well known to need recall. I.A. Richards was excommunicated on the evidence of his book on Coleridge. Leavis told his students that in the course of reviewing it he had kicked the book across the room. Like Leavis’s erstwhile friend and Scrutiny ...”

“... the question (asked by a black reporter at the first debate with George Bush) that would cost Michael Dukakis – an opponent of the death penalty – the 1988 Presidential election, John Wayne once said of Ethan Edwards: ‘he was no villain ... The Indians fucked his wife. What would you have done?’ Confusing the niece with the wife and rape with ...”

“... the ‘English garden’; the three bells at Russian stations; the crunch of felt boots on white snow: in every miserable hotel in Clichy, in every little cottage in Clamart in the Twenties, such memories had the power to transport the haunted rememberer across time only to hurl him back into the odour-filled prison of Russian poverty with its black ...”

“... atmosphere, their identical reference points of hands and heads and hair and flowers and grass and snow and shadow. That ‘silence on other subjects’ that Brecht mentioned in a quite different context, is part of the effect. Nothing else, Hamilton implies, can have any being next to such losses. Each individual poem is pruned back to an austere and ...”

“... oh Shropshripshire of my oligarchical youth!’ David Coward sees the cousins as ‘prefiguring Snow White’s dwarves and the Marx Brothers’, but its a pretty faint forecast, and the reason these characters are really no antidote to Cohen’s lofty despair is that they obviously come from just the same region of the disappointed soul. The satire and the ...”

“... his fingers in many books, or his computer open on many sites; things shake out indifferently like snow or feathers from the airing bedding of Frau Holle in the German Märchen: There was a British flag next to the desk of the immigration agent. There was a .32-calibre revolver in his back pocket. Liberty Chief, made in Japan. The past is full of exotic ...”

“... Collinson erected a billiard table on the sea-ice of Cambridge Bay. The table was fashioned from snow blocks, the cushions from walrus skin stuffed with oakum. The table surface was a finely-shaved sheet of freshwater ice; the balls were hand-carved from lignum vitae. Lopez draws on botany, field biology, ethnography, anthropology, geology, palaeontology and ...”