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“... to stand. All this reflects the paradoxical legacy of Deng Xiaoping: most Chinese curse the Party freely and sigh for democracy, but no one wishes to stir up the dreaded luan (‘disorder’) that the Party’s overthrow would entail. There is a rather blurred hope for the Party’s peaceful evolution: the possibility which Mao feared and launched the ...”

“... their work, especially when it manifested itself as self-conscious ordinariness in poets such as John Masefield and Wilfred Gibson. Thomas felt that trying to be down to earth was part of the same problem; instead he wanted a poetry whose interplay of self-expression and common forms would always make it mean more than the writer could choose or control ...”

“... covers the same period as this new collection; but there was plenty of work for the new editor, John Evans. The diaries were begun when Britten was 15 and ended, rather abruptly, when he was 25. They were written in pocket diaries, the earlier entries mostly fitting into the space allowed by the format, four days per page. As his interests widened Britten ...”

“... writers and artists and drinking buddies, Kerouac then had few admirers. In 1950, under the name John Kerouac, he had published The Town and the City, a lengthy, rather formal account of his childhood and youth, heavily influenced by Thomas Wolfe. The novel had made little impression, and Kerouac himself had swiftly turned against it, finding its traditional ...”

“... King’s College, London. His first book, a history of the Coldstream Guards written jointly with John Sparrow, was published in 1951. And there you have Michael Howard. Though he has grown in fame and distinction, and moved in governing circles on both sides of the Atlantic, and held four chairs including the Regius Professorship of Modern History at Oxford ...”

“... previous publication he has investigated Tennyson’s sufficiently well-known habit of borrowing freely from earlier work of his own, and this inquiry is now extended in several directions. The poet frequently echoes the writing of others, and while much of this reminiscent matter is there to be spotted by any educated reader, a significant amount belongs to ...”

“... the Alamein dinner, to which I looked forward with keener and keener anticipation. Indeed, like John Osborne waiting for Max Miller to come on stage in whatever provincial repertory theatre it was that he had sought him out, I found that I began to laugh before the Field-Marshal rose to speak and that while he was speaking I was reduced to tears by the ...”

“... She was stout, and she had a double chin; the skin of her bosom, although she had powdered it freely, was red, and her face was red too. But she looked well and healthy and full of beans. From this smoothly de-invidualising technique burgeoned those Maughamish aphorisms which still delight some: ‘It’s very hard to be a gentleman and a ...”

“... practical of men, it seems. His wife, Esther, the tough one, had two goals, the art historian John Rewald wrote: ‘to make friends happy while at the same time running his life by any means she could think of’. Together she and Lucien produced the 30-plus books printed by the Eragny Press, the subject of the current exhibition at the Ashmolean (until ...”

“... support to most of the claims being made for ‘narrative poetry today’ – should have told John Haffenden in an interview for Viewpoints that he found Robert Frost’s fable of imagined unlived lives, ‘The Road Not Taken’, exemplary. If Fenton’s distinction between the narrative kinds is just, so is the note of regret and rebellion that he ...”

“... in The Sheltering Sky is to present three highly self-conscious American characters wandering freely in North Africa. He allows them to travel in search of some ineffable experience, away from the filth of Western culture, towards a strange, almost deadened sense of self. He gives them hardly any past, merely some thoughts and observations and ...”

“... mythological studies – Levi-Strauss, Geertz, Winch, Gadamer, Ricoeur and many others – drop freely enough onto the page, often accompanied by the ipsissima verba; and the book ends by hailing Alasdair MacIntyre as Vico’s likeliest modern heir, assisted by Joyce, with a final helping hand from Edward Said. But Mali does not stay long enough with any of ...”

“... its blood-supply – and an uncontainable paunch. He was a bohemian malgré lui, someone who spent freely on getting clothes made for him, in hopes of being mistaken for one of his fictional dandies, yet always looked a mess; who was a tremendous talker (if chiefly about himself) yet who, according to the snobbish Alfred de Vigny, salivated as he spoke because ...”

“... our gaze (disapprovingly) towards the Parliament, which incidentally had been democratically and freely elected, thereby preparing the people for the coming of the new Messiah, the dictator ... the relationship between Parliament and the government is a classical theme which, perhaps, would not need further commentary if attempts were not so frequently made ...”

“... it. Her glittering surfaces are absolutely at home with her disrupted deeps, mingling with them as freely as a society lady with lushes and misfits at a cocktail party. This is shown in a specially graphic way by what must remain her masterpiece, though she always hated hearing it referred to as such, The Death of the Heart. The young Eddie and the 16-year-old ...”