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“... has had some effect). He dismisses, at first, what seems to be a crank call offering a scoop about Peter Lyons, the Labour justice minister at Holyrood and a man widely seen as heir apparent to the party’s leader. But this story isn’t about fumbling with a diary secretary, subletting a tax-subsidised constituency office or even setting fire to curtains at ...”

“... Most of the chapters are a very personal kind of literary criticism of books by writers such as Peter Davidson (The Idea of North), Nan Shepherd (The Living Mountain), Richard Jefferies (Nature near London), J.A. Baker (The Peregrine), Jacquetta Hawkes (A Land) and Roger Deakin (Waterlog). It’s interesting that all these were connoisseurs of nature rather ...”

“... children to feed the ducks, just like our parents used to do with us. And we watched the news and read the papers, which was the usual depressing experience. The two main stories in June were the handing over to relatives of the dead of the report by the Northern Ireland police’s Historical Enquiries Team into the 1976 Kingsmill massacre, in which ten ...”

“... was the Sun’s front-page splash on 15 February: ‘Shock Claims in Secret File’, the strapline read, with a hammer and sickle at either end. The story was based on recently declassified documents in the Czech Security Forces Archive which record three meetings between Corbyn and a Czech diplomat. Two of the meetings, which occurred in 1986 and 1987, appear ...”

“... Pound is now dead and no poet remains of his stature. But poetry is “NEWS that stays NEWS”. READ him: Read HIM.’ The capitalisation is very much of the period, and it may he that the message is as well. For the poet’s death was shortly followed by a critical work, Hugh Kenner’s The Pound Era (1974), which placed ...”

“... of which we ought to take account. From this springs a want of confidence in our capacity to read the text intelligently, while those who are readiest to offer guidance too often appear to lack objectivity. Anyone who has felt disheartened by what sometimes looks like a complacent collusion in ignoring difficulties will welcome The Unauthorised ...”

“... States. Certainly, the framers of their Constitution knew it well enough, because they, too, had read Thucydides, who loomed large in their discussions. But he loomed for the fairly obvious reason that although democracy had been born in Europe, it never lasted all that long there, because Europe, from the very earliest days, was always being torn apart by ...”

“... her first autobiographical essay, ‘An Education’, in Granta in 2003. If you haven’t read the book that followed or seen the 2009 movie, the first chapter of the present book will fill you in. She was born in 1944 and grew up in Twickenham, West London, the only child of oddly isolated parents – ‘both from working-class backgrounds but ...”

“... came to the subject in this cold scientific spirit of a demonstrator in surgery would be widely read.’ Sharpe’s intention is to prove Harper wrong by at long last anatomising Turpin before the public gaze. He takes pride in bringing to his task the skills of a professional historian, determined to ‘get history right’. He sets out to expose the ...”

“... Bildung – her engagement with Communism, feminism, psychoanalysis and Sufism – is often read by literary critics as the symbolic history of our age, just as ‘D.H. Lawrence’s proposal that the Industrial Revolution began in the Eastwood of his boyhood and was finally exorcised in the woods of the Chatterley estate is a received fact of literary ...”

“... from her work; today her poems are rather criticised than praised for having about them what Peter Trinder called in his 1984 biography ‘a domestic tidiness’. The poet of home and hearth, of family values and traditional roles, was a single mother. Captain Arthur Hemans had walked out of the family home in 1818, when his wife was pregnant with their ...”

“... bushes in the Sierras, and an assistant to a Japanese gardener; I twice started graduate school, read a great deal, and even taught myself Latin and German. Virtually none of this went into my writing.’ ‘Instead,’ Solotaroff ruefully recalls, ‘I laboured on my few ironic tales of empty lives.’ Most writers, when they begin to write, are actually ...”

“... eyes, smiling the cheerful smile of the dead, Munditia still greets visitors to the Church of St Peter in her glass case. Since the late 17th century she has served as the patroness and protector of single, unmarried women. Her feast day, traditionally celebrated with great ceremony, falls on 17 November. Koudounaris describes the miraculous cures that the ...”

“... the Formalists would say, is conveyed in the selection of poems translated by Jon Stallworthy and Peter France, and in France’s excellent study Poets of Modern Russia, which besides that on Pasternak contains informative essays on Blok, Akhmatova, Mandelstam, Tsvetaeva, Mayakovsky, and the poets of today. A particularly admirable feature of this Cambridge ...”

“... 13 January. One of Peter Cook’s jokes, several times quoted in his obituaries, is of two men chatting. ‘I’m writing a novel,’ says one, whereupon the other says: ‘Yes, neither am I.’ And of course it’s funny and has a point, except that Peter, I suspect, felt that this disposed of the matter entirely ...”