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“... and dirt, piles it on), who is holding out his own toy for the other boy to see. He is shaking the cage, baiting its inmate – ‘a live rat!’ The poem ends: ‘And the two children laughed at each other in a brotherly way, and their teeth were equally white.’ A live animal is so much more fascinating than the splendid doll, for reasons that underlie the ...”

“... will my flailing material assume?’ Carter, one gathers, felt the opposite to Welty. She told John Haffenden, in 1984, that in The Passion of New Eve, she created Tristessa, the transvestite movie star, ‘in order to say some quite specific things about the cultural production of femininity’. Her training in medieval literature had given her a liking ...”

“... In her speech accepting the Premio Galileo Galilei, which opens the second volume, she credited John Florio, a brilliant promoter of Italian learning in 16th-century London, with introducing her not only to Giordano Bruno but also to ‘members of the Warburg Institute, then newly arrived in London with their wonderful library’. In her dealings with past ...”

“... possibilities of language and the eccentric image, invoking ‘My nine-tiered tigress in the cage of sex’, asking: Who at the kiss, who has not seen, over The waterfalling hair at the shoulder of Life, Death from his own face staring out of a glass. He moves often between ecstasy and absurdity: What when borne upward breaking from heaven downward It ...”

“... the only restrained beasts. Tam and Richie are always being ‘herded’ in and out of buildings; John Hall compares them to roaming wildebeest, and tells his brother to ‘take them to the pens ... That’s the best place for them.’ The Holocaust parallels, too, are laid on pretty thick. Donald describes the ‘permanent electric high-tensile fence’ as ...”

“... Powerlessness, his 1980 study of quiescence and rebellion among Appalachian ‘mountaineers’, John Gaventa noted that where ‘a positive self-image is not portrayed for a particular group, that group may develop a sense of inadequacy about itself, reinforced by how other groups project their media stereotypes on them’ – and he isn’t talking about ...”

“... Wrestling was big. Both WWF and WCW were available, briefly, on terrestrial TV, and my friend John and I founded our own wrestling magazine. We hashed it together with the help of the pre-broadband Ask Jeeves internet, surreptitiously, with nerve-shredding slowness, loading pages during IT lessons so that we could copy and paste match reports into no ...”

“... landed in a single lump, and that was where they built Enscombe!’ Worse, as the late Reverend Cage’s History of the parish helpfully opines, Enscombe is a typical Hampshire name, not at all a Yorkshire one: the etymology may be from Enna’s Combe, ‘suggesting a connection with the Sicilian vale where Proserpine, gathering flowers, herself a fairer ...”

“... seemed to him even more hopeless than his own. Killing them seemed like letting a bird out of a cage. But he stops short of claiming he killed out of pity; he killed them, he says, because ‘I could only relate to a dead image of the person I could love ... The sight of them brought me a bitter sweetness and a temporary peace and fulfilment.’ He wore his ...”

“... with which Bate invites us to grieve over Hughes’s death: ‘The jaguar was at rest in his cage.’ Particularly significant pronouncements or developments are delivered breathlessly, as so often in biographies that pander to a hunger for the sensational, in sentences that lack a main verb: ‘Then a row, an explosion of anger. Sylvia, a trapped ...”

“... to sit on so that at least I could force a smile’), Prescott and his bulimia. Cherie Blair and John Prescott may not have been the most unpopular figures of Blair’s government but they were the two who had the hardest time in the press. Both spent long stretches in the contemporary equivalent of the stocks; a scarring experience, and both of them were ...”

“... display the arc of a ball’s flight from the moment it’s struck to its distant landing. Golf, John Updike wrote, is of all games ‘the most mystical, the least earthbound, the one wherein the wall between us and the supernatural is rubbed thinnest’. I’m not sure about that. To witness (or in the unlikely event execute) a decisive action in pretty ...”

“... Sexual Dissidence, have caused scarcely a ripple outside the literary critical lagoon, but when John Boswell, a rather old-fashioned medieval historian, claimed to have discovered evidence for gay marriages being celebrated and blessed inside Christian churches, he made waves. It is not altogether obvious why the suggestion should be so shocking. Why is it ...”

“... heard before, of how Wheldon and the BBC went to inordinate lengths to block the publication of John Bowen’s novel The Birdcage because it featured the presenter of a television arts programme who in appearance and manner (‘a kind of scoutmaster of culture presenting units from his troop to the viewers for 45 minutes every Friday night’) seemed to be ...”

“... split personality’: ‘The Japanese and American parts of me were now blended into one.’ John Okada’s novel No-No Boy, published in 1957, is bleaker; its title refers to a loyalty oath exacted from Japanese-Americans, which contains two key questions about their willingness to serve in the American Army and renunciation of allegiance to the ...”