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“... could not have been so sharp if he had not been impelled to use so much unpromising material. Kenneth Buthlay’s little book is a useful short introduction to MacDiarmid’s work; Catherine Kerrigan’s book I have already commended. Alan Bold is too mesmerised by the deeps or by the big words that go with them to be the best of guides to this ...”

“... pounding the back lots and working the studio corridors, at the age of 29 Clancy drove his red and white DeSoto convertible across America and went into European exile. ‘It came back to this, the sheer shock, in my own country, of walking along the street and seeing faces behind which are no ideas, or even enjoyment. No. No more of this. It was time to ...”

“... Still we want to reach the West, looking for ‘cliffs against which the waves forever lift their white hands, not in despair, not in joy. Paths lined with flowers that sing their identifications like birds, leading through an infinity of fields, in each of which is an old man remembering its name.’ And so, when Kev Howett, one of the leading rock-climbers ...”

“... of the CIA, William Casey. Casey and the gang of right-wing fanatics he quickly promoted to the White House were obsessed with the clandestine. They didn’t think much of elected politicians, and preferred to carry out their policies behind the backs of Congress and the Senate. For them, the Iran-Iraq war held out glorious opportunities for covert ...”

“... Punk rockers looked ugly, partly because, being ill-favoured, gangly and for the most part poor-white geeks, they were to the manner born, and partly because they wanted to. They sounded ugly, partly because not many could play their instruments very well, partly because they were out of their heads most of the time, but mostly because they wanted to. The ...”

“... have flickering memories of television programmes glimpsed or devoured on our parents’ black and white TVs. Two in particular have stayed with me for more than five decades. First of all there was The Singing Ringing Tree, which I must have seen on one of its first BBC broadcasts in the mid-1960s. Subsequent DVD releases have revealed that, in its original ...”

“... freed.Free produce was not limited to colonial crops. As well as sugar, cotton and rice (both white and ‘red’), British merchants could acquire a range of new and exotic goods from African sellers. Palm oil and peanut oil were lubricants for industrial machinery and were also used in the production of soap and candles; camwood was a brilliant red ...”

“... along with Hartigan, included Frankenthaler, Freilicher, Mitchell, Leslie, Rivers, O’Hara, Kenneth Koch, John Ashbery and James Schuyler – liked their conversation dry and shaded. But Hartigan could also be oppressively earnest. Immediately after describing the day she spent with Freilicher, Hartigan continued: ‘Her desire to “draw” well makes ...”

“... and Rakosi were included. In came Pound alongside Williams. But so did disparate work by Eliot, Kenneth Rexroth, Mary Butts and others. Once again the team colours that Monroe had asked Zukofsky to supply had run in the wash. Still, the core Objectivists knew what they didn’t like. For instance, the ‘semi-allegorical gleam’ of Symbolism ...”

“... observer and metaphor-maker – a poem on a magazine page ‘swimming in a little gel pack of white space’; a freshly laundered shirt emitting, when shaken, ‘the sound of a flag at the consulate of a small, rich country’ – Baker can be entertainingly fussy about vocabulary. ‘“Panties” is a word to be avoided, I feel,’ we’re told in The ...”

“... Genevieve, in which expressing the need for a ‘profound emotional experience’ was the closest Kenneth More’s character was allowed to come to saying that he was desperate to get laid? Stubbs begins his book by musing on the irony of the humour-loving Brits electing a comedian as their last-but-two prime minister. It’s an early hint at his thesis that ...”

“... after being involved in a male brothel scandal, and a close friend of his Cambridge tutor, James Kenneth Stephen, a cousin of Virginia Woolf, who fasted to death in an asylum after Eddy died. Is that all the scandal, then? Well no, not quite. Eddy died in 1892 only weeks after he became engaged to Princess May (as the future queen was then known). We are ...”

“... upon a time the history of the Thirties used to be discussed as though the issues were black and white. Churchill, having prophesied the danger from Hitler and called for measures to resist him, was right. The appeasers, having failed to rearm or call a halt to aggression, were wrong. Time, detachment, and a generation of research, have altered the ...”

“... substance, more power and grim humour, more knowledge, than ten average novels put together. Kenneth Marchal Toomey, the narrator, is a novelist, born in 1890 and in his mid-eighties when we last hear from him. His lifetime takes in a lot – World War One, the Easter Rising, the aviators Alcock and Brown. Prohibition, Fascism, Nazism, World War Two, the ...”

“... above where the eagles soared.’ A main problem for the West Indian novelist, according to Kenneth Ramchand, is how to handle the ‘language of the master’ – the white predecessor who stands ambivalently as former slave-owner and literary source. Heath’s method is to thin his style to a minimum, owing the ...”