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“... Catherine was feeling unwell. On the phone, she’d asked me to bring her some soup from Melrose & Morgan, along with the orders of service, maybe a cake, and a good new novel. Catherine reads with conviction, quotes Shakespeare by the yard, and behaves as if only forgetfulness could explain one’s deepest stupidities. She was a producer on Panorama in the ...”

“... moment is Yeats’s dishevelled plea to his sweetheart Maud Gonne not to marry the loutish John MacBride, who was to become one of the executed rebels of the Easter Rising. Here, under intense emotional pressure, Yeats’s spelling packs up almost completely, along with his grammar and syntax, collapsing into a garbled semiosis which Julia Kristeva ...”

“... excerpted in the notes, Thomas distances himself from ‘the Master’. What a shame that Edmund Morgan, having learned so much from Freud, forgot to mention him in his work on the Puritan family. As for E.R. Dodds, it’s unscrupulous of Gay to offer his Greeks and the Irrational as exemplary Freudian scholarship when its debts to Nietzsche and Malinowski ...”

“... John Wieners​ once told his nephew he had met the Virgin Mary. ‘Did she say anything to you?’ Walter asked. ‘No,’ John said, ‘she doesn’t know how to speak.’ He paused. ‘But she’s learning.’ Wieners was born to a working-class family outside Boston in 1934, educated by Jesuits, and spent formative periods of his youth in New York, San Francisco and Black Mountain, North Carolina ...”

“... in The Tiger and the Rose; but he is evidently not quite satisfied with them. Turn for a moment to John Masters’s strangely similar novel, Man of War. It is an apologia for another sort of fighting man, a professional soldier. The hero, Dusty Miller, squeezes his way into the British Army during World War One, aged only 16; when World War Two comes ...”

“... bill and ‘coughs up $100,000’ for expenses. All the lesser characters echo his obsession. John Adams, the first vice-president, thought his salary (a quarter of the president’s) ‘a sort of "curiosity"’; it has not been recorded, Vidal writes, whether ‘Adams wept’ about his sorry financial condition. Vidal is tapping one of the trustiest ...”

“... best-selling writers, their business is not in the main literary, and in 1972 the prizewinner, John Berger, made a speech in which he expressly deplored what he regarded as the exploitative nature of the donor’s principal interest; indeed he gave half his prize to a revolutionary movement. Other writers have shown some embarrassment but have not, so far ...”

“... year. These new clients are people who, ‘like the rest of us’, as one of their volunteers, John Monaghan, says, ‘were living on 110 per cent of their salaries’; this year, something in the working situation has changed, and they cannot manage their usual debts, mortgage, car, credit card. Monaghan is also worried about the effect of the recent ...”

“... fictive, prospective or real (floods, kidnappings, automobile accidents, the Beast of St John); fairy tales; shopping malls, hospitals, high street stores, dinner parties, graves. All these places and events can break people, or contain those who are broken. She can even put many of these things in the same poem. ‘Sensual Pleasures’ (another new ...”

“... instances of a general aversion to scrutiny than of a particular animus against the BBC. But Nicky Morgan’s final speech as culture secretary, before leaving the government in the recent reshuffle, showed that the government had the BBC in its sights: unless it stayed ‘relevant’, she said, it would be impossible to justify its continued existence in an ...”

“... Wyld, were part of a fleet of drivers assembled by Lily de Gramont. Dolly Wilde joined them. Anne Morgan, daughter of J.P. Morgan, started the ‘heiress corps’ with her partner, Anne Murray Dike. For many, it was liberating. Women referred to one another by their surnames, as if they were soldiers or schoolboys, or gave ...”

“... taken. Then the Troubles flared up again; and the IRA bombing campaign came to the mainland; and John McGrath wrote The Cheviot, the Stag and the Black, Black Oil; and suddenly it was 1974, and there were two close-run general elections, and not only did the Ulster Unionists matter even in England, but so did a couple of hitherto obscure and eccentric ...”

“... to give a canonical stamp to work which was more appropriately read within a manuscript culture. John Suckling’s Fragmenta Aurea appeared in 1646, four years after the poet’s death, probably by suicide, in France. Its printer places poems to the King at the start of the volume in order to make it look like a piece of aggressive nostalgia from a dead and ...”

“... and tried to keep the Pacific as a private lake. Only a few years before this the terrible Henry Morgan, whose exploits and enormous plunder make Kidd’s dwindle into insignificance, had been knighted and made lieutenant-governor of Jamaica. The buccaneers came from all the maritime nations and the mixed crew often agreed very well: but in 1689 William III ...”

“... transfigure reality, not to reflect it – which is why, from the heretical medieval philosopher John Scottus Eriugena to Bishop Berkeley and W.B. Yeats, there is such a robust Irish faith in the imagination’s power to summon new worlds into existence. Philosophically, this suspicion of realism went hand in hand with a rejection of rationalism and ...”