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“... The show opens in 12th-century London, where Becket was born in 1120, or thereabouts, to a Norman mercantile family of rising prosperity. Some pottery, coins and a pair of bone ice skates, supplemented by a manuscript illustration of boys skating and sledging, represent the environment in which the young Becket grew up, but we’re given little sense ...”

“... post a statement to the nation’. So, too, the closing image of ‘Inventions’, an elegy for Norman Nicholson, refers to June grass as ‘yellowish’: ‘that shade old Faber covers/fade to, when a book was a real book’. That last phrase works like ‘fancy name’: ‘real’ looks crudely reactionary at first, but in the context of grass and death ...”

“... muse in tow, or by themselves, they kinged it in smoky pubs. Hard to imagine the sly and brilliant Norman MacCaig whingeing on about his masculinity. Now, however, earlier feminist explorations are being rediscovered in the late stories of Margaret Oliphant and the novels of Willa Muir and Catherine Carswell. Young women writers are finding that they have a ...”

“... done over by the Checking Department at the New Yorker, then Knopf’d, then winner of the ‘Page One Award for Science Writing in Magazines’ and, in 1985, runner-up for the American Book Award in Non-Fiction. It is an affluent work brewed in a culture of affluence, and some of this shows in its analyses of eugenical selection – who should breed, who ...”

“... the Whig interpretation of European history, a historical supplement to Jacques Delors. Already on page 21, Duroselle finds it ‘possible to discern in Europe’s history a general if halting growth in compassion, humanity and equality’. Discussing several different ways of viewing the post-1945 history of Europe, he writes: ‘one may, finally, see this ...”

“... invention: it had adorned classical texts to such an extent that it couldn’t be confined to the page’s foot, but swarmed in the margins, lavishly explaining and allegorising. Sometimes the text looks like the last remaining piece of ground above water in a time of flood. But humanist commentators had more urgent critical programmes, some with powerful ...”

“... George Watson’s A.E. Housman: A Divided Life is more like one, but it is not quite one; of Norman Marlow and Maude Hawkins I say nothing. The most satisfying book about Housman is A.S.F. Gow’s Housman: A Sketch but, as Mr Graves says, its aims are limited, since it is mainly concerned with Housman’s scholarship. Mr Graves’s book takes us through ...”

“... a work-out. In ‘Scarlet Ibis’, for instance, a character wheeled on to provide local colour on page 187 (‘a trim grey haired woman in a tailored pink summer suit that must have been far too hot’) changes her hair colour by her next appearance, two pages and about five minutes of narrative time later (‘Christine talked with the pink-suited woman, who ...”

“... The impetus to all this is not just satirical; it is a knowingly futile attempt to do on the page what contemporary painters were doing on canvas. A writer could produce a litany of bourgeois detritus, could borrow from various ‘discourses’, but, as the narrator of another story puts it, a painter can simply ‘pick up a Baby Ruth wrapper in the ...”

“... was to save that manuscript! He joked about everything but not about this. Heller began the first page of every book hoping to write something for the ages. He managed it once, critics generally agree, but his later efforts all fell short. The problem was the standard. A book for the ages requires something more than a talented author with a good idea at the ...”

“... course of four years but reads as if it had been done in white heat over six weeks; each written page represents the compression of a thousand pages read. The moral pressure is extraordinary: with just a few happy exceptions, the story of each writer is told as a miniature tragedy, a squandered opportunity, a failure. ‘What was it he had missed?’ Kazin ...”

“... placed in the book and the reader is not helped by the absence of an index and a contents page that does not list the contents. Perhaps the publishers set out to be mysterious: neither the title (which heads the last section consisting of a single essay called something else) nor the cover (the detail of a painting by Caravaggio) seem to have anything ...”

“... more rejections the six received, the more farouche their work became, the more unrealisable. The page or the gallery was as far as their imagined buildings would go. A design, they claimed, was not a stage on the way to glass and brick, but an end in itself.Perhaps. The group’s rather wobbly aim seems to have been to create a representation of tomorrow ...”

“... of reinforcements may be diluted but his intentions stretch from the grave. According to one of Norman Foster’s apparatchiks working on the Apple project, ‘We have a building that is pushing social behaviour in the way people work.’ Maybe not so chummy. While over at Google: ‘We … hope to bring new life to the unique local environment ...”

“... immediate crisis of 1916-17 is skipped over until Volume II, when it receives not much more than a page or two. An important issue such as Stolypin’s efforts to reform agriculture is dismissed in a few sentences: Stolypin ‘failed’. In one of his reviews, Carr states that the chief reform occurred in 1908: it came, in fact, in 1906. Obviously, he did not ...”