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“... to be defended. One thing is certain: the family is the norm. In Cohabitation without Marriage Michael Freeman and Christina Lyon argue that the law constantly assimilates non-marriage to marriage, the setting up of a ‘free’ non-marital household to the establishment of a regular legitimate family. The consequence is a tendency to impose on ...”

“... facts that the narrator knows, or wants to know, about his parents and grandparents. In June 1914 Michael and Una O’Shaughnessy have a reason for their stay in Cornwall: to conceal the date of birth of their child, conceived out of wedlock. This child is Rene, who grows up in Dublin, Bray and Sandymount in the 1920s. In 1934 she is an actress in a touring ...”

“... and pictures ‘a man in love with silence, in / terror of silence, and in love with that: tundra, snow oceans’. The ‘sensuous grace and ... aesthetic ambiguity of song’ which Davie credits to Calvin are beautifully at work here. What would it mean to renounce a world we didn’t love; or to fall in love with silence without having been, perhaps even ...”

“... home from school. It was a lovely, sunny autumn day, with spiderwebs flying about in the air like snow. We were barefoot that day, like every day from spring to late autumn. Every villager dreamed of owning a pair of boots. We children were lucky if we had a decent pair of shoes. We wiped our noses on our sleeves and kept our trousers up with a piece of ...”

“... bypass. Ah, I can beat him there. I went on up to Islip, crunching over the rough ice and frozen snow. I now have an ambition, which comes back to me, since I am so near the right location, to skate the moor of Rannoch one hard winter. But I get older, and the problems of the task remain: how to combine a frost hard enough to make Loch Ba solid, yet leave ...”

“... her exhibition at the newly expanded Royal Academy (until 12 August), begins with a scene of snow-covered mountains, The Montafon Letter, 12 feet high and 24 feet wide, done in chalk on nine blackboards joined together. Despite its scale and photorealistic detail, it looks dangerously erasable. It depicts an avalanche, arrested in motion: apparently at a ...”

“... dimensions of Maxwell’s leased Escorial, there is also a view of Headington Hill Hall in the snow. The photographs are not the only part of the book calculated to divert the reviewer from his task. Appendix Four contains the esoteric roll-call of Maxwell’s scientific journals, nearly four hundred of them, with titles like Acta Geologica ...”

“... about this essentially nice man, and I felt a little guilty about apparently having started this snow into action.’ As to the Bennites, his strictures are unanswerable and all that has happened in the last three years has confirmed them. Even now, their delusions still appear almost unbelievable, and I do not suppose Johnson would wish to change a word. As ...”

“... at Liverpool University, that when he started ‘you were expected to work in the rain, the snow and gale force winds and everything. There was no protective clothing, you were just expected to work in your ordinary clothes.’ Meeting the men in the Alms House was like meeting miners during their dispute (which was over in a fraction of the time): you ...”

“... years at the offices of Horizon. ‘Understandably, Connolly was never comfortable with Kavan,’ Michael Sheldon wrote in Friends of Promise, his book about Connolly. He was presumably referring to her heroin addiction. Friends and mentors over the years – Rhys Davies. Peter Owen, Brian Aldiss – have made considerable efforts to dispel such feelings of ...”

“... place. Brophy and Murdoch, who was a decade older, got on immediately. Brophy had just married Michael Levey, whom she’d met at a New Year’s party. ‘I was struck,’ he said, ‘by her blondeness and the unmissable diamond-like quality of her mind.’ Levey was an assistant keeper at the National Gallery, and it took three dates for them to decide to ...”

“... without the other. Those who have both will find that, among contemporaries, Christopher Reid and Michael Hofmann are classified as love poets but Craig Raine and Tony Harrison as blue versifiers. Only a few poets make both, including Seamus Heaney, who has two poems unworthy of him in the Whitworth (one about unfreezing a vaginal pump, one about a ...”

“... smashed up his father-in-law’s desk. ‘Symbolic action’, Blok recorded pithily in his diary. Michael Gordin’s book helps to explain the action’s symbolism and its violence. Blok’s father-in-law, the desk’s first owner, was the greatest of Russian chemists, Dmitrii Mendeleev, who died in 1907 at the age of 73. Mendeleev had put himself at the ...”

“... Two scientists were watching her: Mohamedi Seifu Kalunde, a Tanzanian traditional herbalist, and Michael Huffman, an American biologist. The herbalist informed his companion that the bitter-leaf plant is a strong, broad-spectrum medicine used against malaria, schistosomiasis, amoebic dysentery and intestinal worms. Later chemical analysis showed that ...”

“... Edward Crankshaw and C.A. Lejeune, a socially and intellectually glamorous world, particularly to Michael Frayn, one of a group of us who went to the exhibition. But, of course, London itself was beginning to seem glamorous then – the Coffee House in Northumberland Avenue, the Soup Kitchen in Chandos Place, films at the Academy on Oxford Street and suppers ...”