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“... enclosed by granite frames with name and epitaph inscribed at one end. Elsewhere there are new graves, with stones pushing up like teeth from under the grimy soil, on some of which there are jars with plastic flowers stuck in them, and a good deal of activity – hearses arriving, graves being dug and coffins being ...”

“... and characters who were, so to speak, authors of the author. Nationalism required eminent literary graves to sanctify the native soil and compensate for the inadequacy of Westminster Abbey, where it was impossible to muster the right feelings of awe and reverence. Poets’ Corner, a clutter of sepulchral furniture and bric-à-brac where poets were either ...”

“... S. S. Prawer is Taylor Professor of German Language and Literature at Oxford. Robert Phillip Kolker is Associate Professor of Film Studies (in the Department of Communication Arts and Theatre) at the University of Maryland, College Park. But don’t let the insignia fool you. Both gentlemen, I suspect, are movie fans at heart ...”

“... Poetry pro that I hardly am, I feel that, and I guess Ian Hamilton does too. His biography of Robert Lowell came out in 1982 (at the time, I was half-seriously trying to write a PhD on him). Hamilton, as he writes in ‘A Biographer’s Misgivings’, the first piece in Walking Possession, knew his subject fairly well: ‘I had seen quite a lot of Lowell ...”

“... beauty, sweet reason must veil their heads, they must give way to arguments of power.’ Robert Graves writes in his autobiography that, back in the hills of Harlech, he found himself ‘still mentally and nervously organised for war’, automatically sizing up the landscape for places to site a Lewis-gun and provide cover for his rifle-grenade ...”

“... Keats walked this coast he felt it followed him,’ I said. But our plans involved Robert Burns. Karl, since he first began publishing Seamus in the New Statesman in the 1960s, always felt there was a clear affinity between Burns and Heaney. They were both the sons of farmers and they both allowed nature to oxygenate the mind and inflect the ...”

“... their beautifully elaborated and uncomplicating meaning. The hammer of modern English metre, what Robert Graves called the smith-work of ti-tum, ti-tum, is going on during the deeper, longer oar-work of Old English, and the ear, no matter how ignorant it may be of the provenance of what it is hearing, picks up on the contest. This contest, perfectly ...”

“... a thick, oily and malodorous fog that made it harder for German gunners to find their targets.As Robert Graves, Siegfried Sassoon and other memoirists of the First World War made clear, there was always a radical division between ‘the line’ and ‘behind the line’. The line meant mud, blood, rats, inedible rations and the continuous, unbearable ...”

“... this valley already, and we worked out the meaning of life years ago: “Walk tall and spit on the graves of your enemies.” Wasn’t that it?’ ‘No, no,’ said Johnny. ‘It was “love thy neighbour as thyself.”’ ‘Oh, well, given how much I love myself, it amounts to pretty much the same thing.’ ‘Oh, darling,’ said Julia, resting her ...”

“... of a town? Can you dedicate a book to a dot – two dots – on the map? The poet and academic Robert Crawford has a soft spot for nice spots and he dedicated his 1990 collection, A Scottish Assembly, ‘to Scotland’. Some countries and some cities – like some people – openly insist on being loved, and some of them behave as underdogs, which only ...”

“... the latter. But he has a wonderful ear for voice in unfamiliar and little-known poems by Herbert, Graves, Christina Rossetti, Kenneth Ashley, and he opens with a marvellous one – surely his own discovery – by the Medieval chronicler John Lydgate, about a horse called Lyarde, too old now to work. They lead him to the smithy to pull off his shoon And put ...”

“... is no within within. This book, left incomplete at the time of Farson’s death and tidied up by Robert Violette, is touching and illuminating in part because there is such a mismatch between the author and his subjects. Gilbert and George can only be defined in a series of paradoxes. They have photographed and exhibited their shit and their arses, not to ...”

“... for ‘nine-tenths of the reading of the reading public’. When, in 1928, Laura Riding and Robert Graves’s Pamphlet against Anthologies charged the genre with reducing poetry to a ‘packet-commodity’, the only alternative that they proposed revealed just how inescapable the anthology had become. The ‘full Corpus’ that could drive ...”

“... on stories about his ancestors who were killed in the First World War and on photographs of their graves taken by Porter’s grandchildren. The poem is striking not least for its sympathy with his parents: My Mother must have been living still at home When the news came, but she didn’t die alone.             My civilian father did. Another ...”

“... me immensely, and told me privately that Alfred and Blanche Knopf would be rolling over in their graves when the thing was published. Lunar Park is itself a thriller that is nearly as chaotic as its bloated predecessor (there are missing children, a haunted video, demons, a serial killer who is mimicking the murders from American Psycho, terrorist attacks ...”