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“... not so much doctoring the spin as applying snake oil to it, said: ‘This may be Dodge City, but Wyatt is in town.’ According to this model, it seems that the marshals from out of town would sooner shoot it out with ‘the bandits’ than, say, take advantage of superior numbers and firepower to encourage them to throw down their guns and come out with ...”

“... writing now, his work would sit reasonably well with that of a thousand or two thousand years ago: Wyatt, Wang Wei, Propertius, Sappho. He is a plain-spoken metaphysical, purveying a teary elegance, clarity in confusion, insouciant reflection, irreducible unguardedness. There are many places one might begin with Hugo ...”

“... wife. Richard took unto him the Lady Anne, who was played by Nan Grey, though she actually married Wyatt (John Sutton) after they escaped from the Tower, or the Castle. In the end Richard killed just about everybody, except Mord, who got thrown off a cliff by somebody, a fitting end to a miserable career. Other poets stand in line for places at poetry’s ...”

“... most significant poet in the 130 years between the death of Chaucer and the flourishing of Thomas Wyatt; but it has to be said that the competition for the top ranking south of the Scottish border is not very fierce, and until the 1930s such a judgment would have struck most people as bizarre. His poetry had come to be little regarded within fifty years of ...”

“... needs to be borne in mind. There are a lot of 16th-century sonnets. But, if we except Sir Thomas Wyatt’s magnificent though sometimes stumbling work, many of these are paper poems, manifestations of a particular moment in Tudor court culture. Some of this sonnet-writing, Sidney’s in particular, is highly accomplished; some is haunting, such as ...”

“... was the Plantagenet survivor already mentioned, the 15th Earl of Huntingdon, but, says Woodrow Wyatt, he was ‘politely resolute in avoiding inconvenience to himself’. When his second wile proposed that her father should live with them he said nothing but quietly packed his bags ready to move out. This was the man of multiple talents who painted a mural ...”

“... tourist industry centred on the Wild West and its outlaw heroes – you don’t forget that Wyatt Earp and Doc Holliday once walked the streets of Tombstone, Arizona. But no one seems to be walking the streets of Tulsa, Oklahoma, with their used-car lots, pawn shops and bail bond offices. Tulsa even has a Right Wing Restaurant (chicken, I guess), and ...”

“... and bigger bets, makes News Corp close to being a company with no ‘there’ there. From Woodrow Wyatt’s journals for 1986, quoted in The Murdoch Archipelago: Wednesday 1 October. A message to speak to Downing Street urgently. The Prime Minister wanted me to know before the official announcement . . . that Duke Hussey was to be the new chairman [of the ...”

“... Kennedy and De Gaulle to Harold Macmillan (‘a music-hall turn way past his best’), Woodrow Wyatt (‘always a bounder and a cad’) and George Brown (‘an alcoholic for whom the twin obsessions of drink and politics were two attempts to escape from some inner grief’). The aim of biography, he writes, is to understand an individual life by describing ...”

“... the English translations of the Psalms – reading Tyndale, Coverdale, Milton, Sidney, Sir Thomas Wyatt, Francis Bacon, Henry Vaughan, Richard Crashaw and the inspired committee-work of the Authorised Version – one immediately notices that the biblical texts are really quite vile, and that the poets’ ‘personal agendas’ seem almost without exception ...”

“... known: from Mrs Constance Pley of Weymouth, who supplied the navy with sailcloth, to Mrs Ann Wyatt, who built the warship Cumberland. To this extent, the Royal Navy was a microcosm of its home society, a by-product and reflection of its shifting economy, politics and population. But what of the navy and the world beyond Britain? Here Rodger takes a ...”

“... successful Dances with Wolves and the 1994 fiasco of his even more self-regarding and costly Wyatt Earp. Where the Western once proposed an entire moral universe, it is now no more than a few chunks of narrative revolving around the solar majesty of the lead. Is it extinct? As Mitchell points out, ‘almost the moment the Western’ – or, at least, The ...”

“... and Major Mayhew, Major Blackburn, Captain Chetwynd, Major Freeman, Mr Brown, Mr Gaitskell, Major Wyatt, Mr Durbin, Mr Willmott, Major Younger and Major Wells duly contributing, and the Chancellor summing up at the end. It would never have occurred to Gaitskell to say, as Wilson did – because he, Wilson, only hoped it was true – that ‘Labour is the ...”

“... first part of ‘Lo what it is to love’, a poem in the Egerton MS (1535-7), usually ascribed to Wyatt, was by Alexander Scott, a Scots poet known to have been alive in the 1580s. I will gladly let him have the last word, for what it is worth. His insults, though, did seem to me to fall below the usual high Scots standards. But where, it might be asked, does ...”

“... On 23 April 1977 Philip Larkin came to lunch at Barbara Pym’s cottage in Finstock, near Oxford. She and her sister had only been living there a short while, after Pym’s retirement from her post in Fetter Lane as assistant editor of Africa; and it was Larkin’s first and, as it turned out, his only visit. After her years in the wilderness, Pym’s novel Quartet in Autumn had at last been accepted for publication: Larkin and David Cecil had independently named her as their choice of ‘most undervalued writer’ in the 75th-anniversary number of the TLS ...”