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“... 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 ...”

“... baby: ‘what is this thing, startling against the white diaper, like a tiny mouse heart packed in snow?’ The baby is rushed to the hospital (‘Such pleasingly instant service! Just say “blood”. Just say “diaper”. Look what you get!’), where a scan reveals that he has a malignant tumour on his left kidney. The mother first tries to blame her own ...”

“... Mary Fiddler, a fine blooming lass of 18, her – is like silk itself, and bubbles as white as snow; she is just in her prime, and fit for business, she is broke in this spring, by a well-known gentleman of the turf. Her movements are regular, her pace elegant, and her action is good: and when you mount her, she begins to f—k away to the tune of the ‘Dandy O ...”

“... bodyguard of the Emperor Nero, and martyred after he was converted to Christianity by St Paul). St Michael is the best-known archangel, and in his role as destroyer of devils is often portrayed in a terrific suit of armour. He is the patron saint of soldiers and police; his shrine on Monte Gargano in southern Italy remembers his support for the Normans as they ...”

“... the law of conquest. In his stimulating work on Medieval literacy, From Memory to Written Record, Michael Clanchy has stressed the importance of this conflict in Medieval culture between the clerks’ notions of records and rights which were expressed in parchment (notions congenial to desk-bound historians) and the notions of warriors, men of the sword. In ...”

“... furrow through the heat. Rivers steamed. Creeks stopped in their tracks. Sap melted like a lump of snow. There was no mercy anywhere. Sometimes someone brought a little water to the station. What was this ill-formed, lazy train when compared to the beauty of a rustling wood? Thirsty snakes drank from puddles. Hurriedly buttoning their uniforms, sleepy ...”

“... are on their way to the sky. Ovens cremate fields of human cow. Ovens cremate fields of human snow. One has to go back to Sylvia Plath, born just a few years before Seidel, to find such nose-thumbing at atrocity. Sex is another subject Seidel treats with delicacy: ‘I hate seeing the anus of a beautiful woman./I should not be looking. It should not be ...”

“... le départ de l’homme!Madam stands too erect in the meadownearby where filaments of her labour snow; parasolbetween her fingers rolled; careless stroll; too proud;offspring reading on the flowering knolltheir books bound in red leather! Alas, He, likea thousand white angels who part on the roadis already setting off past the hills! She,all frigid and ...”

“... Tiepolo,’ Svetlana Alpers and Michael Baxandall write, ‘is not a difficult painter. He is accessible and easy to like.’ Well, up to a point. For example, while I did not find the Tiepolos in the Royal Academy’s exhibition of 18th-century Venetian art ‘difficult’ in any obvious way, I did not find them ‘easy to like’ either ...”

“... well as a record label, bought the movie rights. The subsequent film, which starred Diana Ross and Michael Jackson, as well as Richard Pryor and Lena Horne, was a commercial and critical flop. But it became classic holiday viewing for many Black Americans, including my family. The Wiz is set in late 1970s New York, dingy and rundown, full of dilapidated ...”

“... stuff of legend – ‘People are fond of fables, aren’t they?/Thus, you and I, alone, amid the snow,/so far away ... I think that England ... ’ – and wryly compares himself to Columbus:                                           True, he suffered, but in recompense discovered such splendid lands, while we have ...”

“... style of interesting poets like Peter Didsbury, John Ash, Pauline Stainer and one of the editors, Michael Hulse, is not particularly ‘democratic’, but playfully enigmatic and donnish. There is a tendency to think aloud with a somewhat creaky jauntiness, as if the poets were sharing secrets with their desks; It has been raining all day, and I found myself ...”

“... am not heart-broken. I have attended several opening ceremonies. On the flight, my brother-in-law, Michael Slater (Michael Pasternak, according to his ticket) is unable to read because the Aeroflot jumbo doesn’t have individual seat lights. He has the aisle seat – exiled to inner darkness. Speaking of darkness, what a ...”