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“... like toadies in the matter of the atomic tests; and the worst offender was the Prime Minister, Sir Robert Menzies, described by one Australian senator as ‘the little lickspittle empire loyalist who regarded Australia as a colonial vassal of the British Crown’. ‘The British Government’s public statements of confidence that all was well with the nuclear ...”

“... made it necessary for him to issue some of the other sort. So that when Edward Bond appropriated Blake, ‘Sooner murder an infant in its cradle than nurse unacted desires,’ he vitiated it with his tacit pretence that the prevalence in our day is that everyone is going about nursing unacted desires. Given these contraries, it will come as no surprise that ...”

“... tackled two generations of remarkable Drysdales and their partners: George, his brother Charles Robert, the latter’s mistress and intellectual colleague Alice Vickery, their son Charles Vickery Drysdale, and his wife Bessie. And when I saw the proofs I realised that she had indeed researched her subject profoundly. Her discoveries about the personal life ...”

“... of genuinely new material while arguing for a volcanic adult sexuality in Tennyson who was, like Blake or Ginsberg, a poet for the wild Sixties. A provocative spin was given to the debate by Robert Bernard Martin in his Tennyson: The Unquiet Heart (1980). Martin traced the Tennysonian gloom back to the fear of stigmatising ...”

“... economically in the words ‘uncouth of speech’. The relentlessly reader-friendly translation by Robert Fitzgerald departs from the usual reading to say the Carians were led by their chief ‘in their own tongue’. Robert Fagles, whose version aims at an idiomatic directness lacking in Lattimore, without the sacrifice of ...”

“... as we emerged from our hobbit holes and combed the cobwebs from our hair: the starship arrival of Blake Bailey’s authorised biography of Philip Roth, Philip Roth: The Biography. The ‘the’ of the subtitle said: accept no substitutes. Another biography of Roth was in the offing, Ira Nadel’s Philip Roth: A Counterlife, a sizeable, solidly ...”

“... verbal receptors vibrating in harmony? Why (lack of talent apart) have more people not done what Blake did? Put his graphic versions of his poems alongside printed versions and the reason becomes clear: O Rose thou art sick. The invisible worm That flies in the night In the howling storm: Has found out thy bed Of crimson joy: And his dark secret love Does ...”

“... kindred to those of nature. The link between this primary Romantic idea and Proust is provided by Blake: ‘eternity is in love with the productions of time’ – having, as Gerhardie adds, nothing else to be in love with outside itself. Poetry is the means by which we sense that love, and so experience ‘the pleasure that there is in life itself’. But by ...”

“... and aggression is to be highly valued – in the dog-eat-dog world of the Stock Exchange and in Robert Bly’s drum-beating – then Woman is made to correspond with tameness. Woman becomes despised, dull domesticity. Woman is too much civilisation, the doilies and anti-macassars of Home. Yet commercial mythology cannot get rid of the myth of Home. For one ...”

“... one way or another Petrarchan: Góngora, Mallarmé, Racine, Shakespeare and – surprisingly – Blake. The activity of translation brings you uniquely close to a writer: you have to find his words again for yourself in your own tongue. Since we cannot translate our own language into itself (or only from texts that have become archaic), it ...”

“... to move them one way or the other. In that sense, ‘a tear is an intellectual thing,’ as Blake puts it in ‘The Grey Monk’. For the same reason, the history of weeping is a slippery enterprise. At the end of his immensely readable and often puckish exploration, Thomas Dixon sighs, with reason, that ‘it is impossible to pin tears down.’ Dixon ...”

“... appeared; Dietrich and Garbo played her on the screen. In one episode of the long-running Sexton Blake series, Plummer, an arch-villain, meets a ‘devilishly beautiful’ dancer from French Indo-China called Vali Mata-Vali: ‘She was dressed in a jacket and harem pantaloons of heavy silk . . . her hair was black as a moonless night . . . Plummer was an ...”

“... Vendler to distort major figures helps her discriminate among lesser planets. Her inclusion of Robert Hayden, for example, is bold and welcome. Moreover, her promise to present writers ‘whole’ has more chance of being fulfilled with subsidiary figures. When Eliot judged anthologies less just to major than minor poets, he was, as often, lending his ...”

“... sorts of American writers: the young Allen Ginsberg paid him homage and copied his style, while Robert Lowell, for example, looked to Williams for a freer, more democratic manner than his rivals could offer. Though he remains an acquired taste in Britain, Williams’s position in American poetry, at least, seems assured. That position rests, above all ...”

“... Dance. ‘A perfectly normal child became a mess of writhing limbs and uncontrollable grunts,’ Blake Gopnik writes. Recent scientific studies have shown ‘a correlation between rheumatic fever in children and adult psychiatric problems such as obsessive-compulsive behaviours and the severe body-image issues of what’s now called body dysmorphia – just ...”