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“... called Memories Look at Me – was almost a sideline for him, occasional, but unusually pure and self-consistent. Poetry was reserved for encounters with the unsettling (das Unheimliche, as German has it), for sinister or joyful impossibilities, for moments when existence abruptly swelled or dwindled. Words like ‘mystical’ and ‘surreal’ get tossed ...”

“... as well as with himself: a sort of art-historical Humbert Humbert with traces of Clive Linley, the self-obsessed composer in Ian McEwan’s Amsterdam. He also has an Irish Catholic background replete with sodomitical priests and echoes of A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man. This upbringing has made him unable to separate a love of art from sexual ...”

“... From the standard perspective which holds that economic agency is based on the rational pursuit of self-interest, the inconsistency of this stance is obvious: populist conservatives are literally voting themselves into economic ruin. Less taxation and increased deregulation means more freedom for the corporations that are driving impoverished farmers out of ...”

“... 21st-century version of Aristotle’s Poetics – and for that matter of Cicero’s On the Orator, Robert McKee’s Story, Joseph Campbell’s The Hero with a Thousand Faces, the entire works of Syd Field, and just about every other book ever written that pretends to reveal the ways fiction, drama or poetry ‘work’ – is tvtropes.org, the ...”

“... the intention is different. She never rejected first-person experience as a basis of her lyrics; Robert Lowell’s Notebook poems were an early influence (‘When Lowell relaxed into the sonnet form, he gave us a new kind of poetry notebook,’ she once wrote). In light of this, her poems’ fragmentary brevity suggests a kind of exploded sonnet, and they ...”

“... quitted with disgust, the cheering fields regained,’ he wrote years later. His self-imposed exile ended only when Sir John Johnstone – who em­ployed him as a land steward on his ­est­ate in Hackness – brought Smith’s maps to the attention of the Royal Geographical Society.A second map exists at Bur­lington House, behind another ...”

“... cowering in their consulting-rooms, and better certainly than any political scientist. Take Robert McKenzie, the television psephologist and master of the swingometer, a figure well-known in the Sixties, but now safely dead – and, as we shall see, without heirs who might want to sue on his behalf. A TV producer once had the idea of filming Abse and ...”

“... the impossible. Bear in mind that even in this group there are sharp differences in ability. As Robert X. Cringely, a (pseudonymous) commentator on the computer business who in 1991 published Accidental Empires, the first and still the best book on the growth of the industry, explains: at the extreme edge of the normal distribution, there are programmers ...”

“... It was reading Robert Lowell that brought me to poetry at the age of 19, in 1976. I had borrowed a friend’s omnibus edition of Life Studies and For the Union Dead, and something in me said: ‘This is it!’ I don’t remember the poem I first had that response to, but most likely it was in Part IV of Life Studies, ‘Dunbarton’ or ‘For Sale’, or perhaps ‘Waking in the Blue ...”

“... who inherited $5000, began to reappraise his relationship with his father. Years later, in a self-published biography, the son would depict Forester as a manipulative fabulist, a distant, self-centred parent, a cold-hearted philanderer, and an insecure snob who was evasive about his origins as Cecil Smith from ...”

“... without a moment’s hesitation. The first, of course, is Dr Owen himself, whose absence of self-doubt is almost as awesome as Mrs Thatcher’s. The other, I am left to assume, is the wholly admirable Debbie Owen, who personifies (and I am quite serious here) all three of the Platonic virtues of Truth, Goodness and Beauty. One of the redeeming features ...”

“... Instead, they have become an underclass trapped in ghettos which (in Lemann’s words) their ‘self-destructive behaviour ... drug use, out-of-wedlock childbearing, dropping out of school’ have turned into ‘among the worst places to live in the world’. What went wrong? It certainly wasn’t that American blacks lacked ...”

“... family regime of ‘black-bloodedness’ (a term which Charles Tennyson popularised) ‘the boyish self-confidence disappeared and Alfred became subject to those moods of self-torment and remorse which are not uncommon in boys of sensitive nature.’ Happily in later life, the poet was able gradually ‘to free himself from ...”

“... a desperate situation to work his best, or indeed to work at all. Wordsworth made the comment that Robert Southey, Coleridge’s brother-in-law, ‘writes too much at his ease’, but the criticism could equally have applied to Wordsworth himself, not because Wordsworth found composition easy – it gave him the psychosomatic pains which only afflicted ...”