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“... both old and new to me then. Burns was ever a slave to the farming business: he is the patron saint of struggling farmers and poor soil. But in actual fact, despite our thoughts and our recovery from our thoughts, in the early 1970s British farming was in a pretty good state. J.G.S. and Frances Donaldson’s Farming in Britain Today, published around this ...”

“... had indeed seen a barely imagined kingdom.’ Herbert is still commonly thought of as an Anglican saint, selfless country priest and poet of divine love. The saintly image was established by Herbert’s early biographers, most fully by Izaak Walton, whose Life of Herbert (1670) devotes half its length to the first 37 years of Herbert’s life, in which he was ...”

“... followed in the 1960s – the Second Piano Sonata, the Concerto for Orchestra and The Vision of Saint Augustine – retained the mosaic form of King Priam, while harmony became like putty in Tippett’s hands, morphing into weird and wonderful shapes.Reading the responses of Tippett’s fellow composers to his late works, I wonder if I am listening to the ...”

“... or beams sticking out unattached at one end or put there to hold up a rococo cupid or a concrete saint’. So it was praised for what it wasn’t, and its not being this or that was one of the striking things about it, although the residue of Imagism was obvious enough: Closed car-closed in glass- At the curb, Unapplied and empty: A thing among others Over ...”

“... scandalous’. (It was also to challenge père Sartre, author of the massive Genet portrait Saint Genet.) Glas seems to have left Genet, the contaminating agent, at a loss for words, as it did most readers.Derrida’s closest intellectual comrade in the late 1960s and early 1970s was the writer and editor Philippe Sollers, who published a number of ...”

“... northern half, including California, and renamed the port town of Yerba Buena after the Italian saint. It has always been populated by dreamers, eccentrics and bohemians as well as opportunists and profiteers; until recently there was room for all of them. The Big Four railroad barons were Sacramento merchants who made small fortunes equipping ...”

“... purpose (do we really need to know that Roth wrote to the co-op board on behalf of his agent, Andrew Wylie? Or that Roth’s friend Joel Conarroe read a goofy telegram at Roth’s sixtieth birthday bash purportedly from John Updike that began ‘Masel gov, you alte cocker’?), but it concretises the sense of comprehensiveness to an impressive, even ...”

“... bus pass which he scrutinises as grimly as an Albanian border guard, even checking the likeness. Andrew Wilson sails through unchallenged.I walk back through the streets of Oxford and as always I have a sense of being shut out and that there is something going on here that I’m not a part of; not that I was a part of it even when I was a part of it.16 ...”

“... have an otherworldly and dreamlike quality that is as thrilling as anything in cinema. The critic Andrew Sarris wrote that watching their close-ups was like ‘gorging on chocolate sundaes’. His face is as sculpted as hers is soft. ‘Do I make you nervous?’ she asks him as she enters a pool room wearing a pale strapless gown with flowers all over the ...”

“... insulation which in turn combusted the Reynobond aluminium panels. (The insulation was made by Saint Gobain UK and the panels were made by Arconic.) This pile of names will no doubt irritate the simplifiers during the several years it takes for the inquiry to provide an answer. But their existence supplies us with one answer now: the tower’s ...”

“... about the origin of Vinteuil’s little phrase. It may derive from a rather inferior sonata of Saint-Saëns; or from something by Fauré; or it may be borrowed from the Good Friday music in Parsifal; or the shepherd’s piping at the beginning of the last act of Tristan. Or, to me the happiest, if not the most probable conjecture, from Beethoven’s Opus ...”

“... Richard Hughes, Naomi Mitchison and C.S. Lewis, and Auden was an early fan. (Auden was a patron saint of lost causes. He was also the only major writer to stand up for Laura Riding.) But mostly, the sort of people who get their opinions published have lashed it with contempt. ‘Hypertrophic . . . A children’s book which has somehow got out of hand ...”

“... really up against it. We have to deal with these things.’ Darwin was similarly enlisted in Andrew Marr’s BBC series Darwin’s Dangerous Idea. Marr discovered that ‘Darwin’s ideas are helping us to save ourselves and all life on earth from extinction … Charles Darwin is the father of ecology. The modern environmental movement was built upon his ...”

“... old as the institution of organised policing itself in Britain. Modern political policing began on Saint Patrick’s Day 1883, when four CID men and eight uniformed officers were picked to form the Special Irish Branch, in response to a Fenian bombing campaign on the mainland. In 1888, the word ‘Irish’ was dropped from the title, and the unit widened its ...”