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“... considering the question, ‘What is an author?’ The two, needless to say, never met. Foucault may have visited Texas on one of his lecture tours, but Junior, as far as it is known, never took his S&M revelry beyond the Ivy League – novelists will have to invent a chance encounter in a basement club in Austin. Moreover, Junior’s general ignorance of ...”

“... organisation on unsuspecting civilian targets and a massive Japanese attack on a naval base may seem a misjudgment, but it was not surprising. That a president would use such a crisis for his own purposes – Roosevelt effectively, Bush disastrously – might also have been expected. But that ‘Ground Zero’, the hypocentre of the first nuclear bomb ...”

“... eyes and listen to the music (remarkable by any standards) but not to read the supertitles. That may be the best advice when all is said and done, but it wouldn’t have pleased Wagner. His commitment to opera as drama was vehement and frequently announced. (In his essays, Wagner was the kind of writer who never says anything once.) And, for better or ...”

“... was especially crucial to the natural experimentalism of the American arts.’ Pound’s poetry may be ‘flawed and idiosyncratic’, but ‘he knew all the time that he was fighting for a new poetry and a new interpretation of all the literature and culture of the past.’ Williams ‘believed in the power of distinctive American speech to give writing a ...”

“... class is amusing, Jilly Cooper has not let her subject down. She quotes the Registrar General and Richard Hoggart and Michael Young, while writing in a manner that falls somewhere between Nancy Mitford and a Daily Mail column. Her characters are fun, her observations acute, and since she does not try her hand at analysis, it is hard to fault her. Yet the ...”

“... young photographers from Japan were taking pictures of other young photographers from Japan. It may be pretty ordinary to most children now – who all have paparazzi for parents – but I was still taken aback to see the scrum around anybody wearing a coloured sock. One man came along the street wearing red braces under a nice grey suit and the Japanese ...”

“... hellish’ onset of night as a black pall lowered without the reassuring interval of dusk. Richard Mabey stands admirably within this tradition, not only as a naturalist and writer on British flora and fauna, but as an expert on inner and outer weather: his Nature Cure (2005) records a bout of severe depression and a re-emergence two years ...”

“... the first in October 1979, a review of J.F.C. Harrison’s book on millenarianism, the last, in May this year, a review of Philip Pullman’s The Good Man Jesus and the Scoundrel Christ. ‘Eloquently’: was that the right word? Not really. Frank’s writing was so much more exact, more stylish, more patient, more ironic, more playful, more attentive, more ...”

“... a time there, acting as nightwatchmen) and the (quite interesting) personal life of the founder. Richard, seventh Viscount Fitzwilliam of Merrion was a collector on a fairly grand scale. When he died early in 1816, he owned about ten thousand printed books, 130 illuminated manuscripts, musical scores (most famously the Fitzwilliam Virginal Book), paintings ...”

“... downtrodden poor, filthy rich, or just lovable child – and which led some photographers, Richard Avedon for example, to borrow the ethnographic mode to suggest that the person in a picture can speak for him or her self.Official portraiture offered its own opportunities. James Waterhouse, who was having a terrible struggle with the heat on an ...”

“... barons of parallel reality and fiscal mockery – Apple, Google, Amazon etc. Skinner’s bludgeon may be absent, his menu 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 ...”

“... did not displace Transcendental Anatomy easily. At the British Museum (Natural History), Richard Owen promulgated a brilliant programme of comparative anatomy based on the idea that the similarities among animals derive from their correspondence to an ideal form – an Archetype built to a Divine Plan. For this, as well as his unattractive ...”

“... property and political influence in the West Country. The poet’s overbearing father, Sir Richard, and his elder brother, Sir Charles, would between them represent Exeter or Devon in Parliament with little interruption between 1743 and 1812. John Bampfylde was educated by private tutors at the family home at Poltimore near Exeter, and later at ...”

“... not neglected, but more context and commentary are required if they are to be understood. Palumbo may have been inspired in his conduct by American museum trustees, who often, and not always unreasonably, behave as if they own the institution they represent. It was under Thatcher that the traditional role of the museum trustee in this country began to be ...”

“... Upper Ontario, From Long Before’, is dedicated to that other Grand Old Man of American Letters, Richard Eberhart, almost exactly Warren’s coeval (Eberhart was born in 1904, Warren in 1905), who has also published a new book of poems. Eberhart, unlike Warren, loves highways: If I drive a thousand miles I feel good. All those cars none hitting the ...”