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“... this is a private event, and you have to go in through the media entrance. We put you people in a cage so you can’t go into the crowd and get them to say things.’ We smiled at each other. This seemed to be the most fun he’d had all day. ‘Go to the media entrance, or I’ll get the Secret Service to drag you away.’ On the way round the building, I ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... There is something off-key about all these jewels and feathers, braid and enamel and gold. When John Singer Sargent’s tremendous portrait of the colonial administrator Sir Frank Swettenham inspired Rebecca West to comment that ‘he looked as if he wasn’t quite a gentleman,’ was she showing her sensitivity to the excess of his display? To the ...”

“... hearing it spoken with his un-English, un-American accent, and reinvented as an estrangement. John Updike is a self-confessed fan, but Joyce Carol Oates, who is not, has also conducted a wonderfully ingenious argument with Nabokov in several novels including The Childwold in 1976 and her Chappaquiddick novella, Black Water, in 1992, where the question of ...”

“... career of a competent civil servant. A member of the king’s household and lifelong retainer of John of Gaunt, Chaucer served as a diplomat, controller of the wool custom, clerk of the king’s works, deputy forester, justice of the peace for Kent and Member of Parliament. In addition to his large poetic corpus, we have several prose works and a few ...”

“... Hawk’, but not because he wished to suggest any hint of beakiness. His predecessor had been John Squire, whose pseudonym was ‘Solomon Eagle’. It is easy enough to see why, for such as Leavis, MacCarthy might be perceived as the apotheosis of indolent metropolitan bookman-ship. Scrutiny, after all, was in some measure aimed as a ‘serious’ riposte ...”

“... chicken grabbed a card out of the deck with its beak, and a few grains of corn dropped into the cage. I don’t remember my fortune anymore, but on the bottom it said: ‘The management is not responsible for the opinions of this chicken.’ In another shed, I watched an aquacade about the sinking of Atlantis starring Ralph the Pig. After two students in ...”

“... hosts are suitably variegated: Lord Glenconner (Colin Tennant) in St Lucia; the historian Sir John Plumb (‘peppery but very entertaining’) also in St Lucia; Norman Parkinson, the photographer, in Trinidad. He visits Richard Branson’s house in the Virgin Islands, pronouncing it to be more tasteful than others he could (and does) mention. He finds ...”

“... Bengal to add to his palace menagerie, she reaches out to touch the animal through the bars of its cage. Isabella, her spoilt elder sister, who likes jewels and court fashions and doesn’t listen in class, dismisses it as a boring, sleepy pet. ‘Wake up! Come on, pussycat, come on!’Fashioning Lucrezia into marriage material means trying to contain her. The ...”

“... In the summer of 1831, James Woods, master of St John’s College, Cambridge, and Wordsworth’s former tutor, decided that his college should have a portrait of its most celebrated living alumnus. He commissioned Henry William Pickersgill – an apprentice Spitalfields silk-weaver turned Royal Academician – to produce a full-length oil painting of Wordsworth in an appropriately sublime setting, and in the early autumn of 1832 Pickersgill made the journey to Rydal Mount ...”

“... to the glass panes of his bookcases, a symbolic gesture she saw as ‘trying to break out of his cage, escape to creation. But he never made it. He had lost his magic power over booze.’In 1932, Natalie Keaton, who had long since banished Keaton to another wing of the mansion, divorced her alcoholic husband. Keaton lost his wife, his home and his ...”

“... feeling like a budgie on display after it had successfully mounted the little ladders in its cage.’ His famous book was originally called The Abuses of Literacy. His publishers showed it to a libel lawyer, who advised them that it was extremely dangerous. To avoid the danger, Hoggart changed Abuses to Uses and removed his quotation from ‘the ...”

“... thinking, yet the move, it not divisive, Can’t help at this stage seeming indecisive. But John De Lorean shows more than strain In several parts of that uplifted face. The handcuffs induce shame on top of pain As in Los Angeles he falls from grace. Busted with many kilos of cocaine Packed nearly in a custom pig-skin case, He’s proved his gull-winged ...”

“... novels and six volumes of collected short stories, he is an industrious translator of the likes of John Irving, Raymond Carver, Tim O’Brien and Scott Fitzgerald. Once the owner of a jazz bar who only had time to write in the small hours, he is now such a cult figure that there are even translations of his novels, complete with Japanese notes, aimed ...”

“... lotion and so on and on – iconic terrorist, iconic toaster, iconic Toby jug … They anticipate John Grindrod’s Weltanschauung. There is very little he sees that can’t have ‘iconic’ attached to it. As he wanders through the places created in the nearly five decades since Thatcher decreed the right to buy he finds the iconic everywhere. He sees it ...”