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“... tired – the sound of words means more than their content; there are reassuring rhythms. I bought Ben Marcus’s first book, The Age of Wire and String, in a remainder shop soon after it was published, without knowing what kind of thing it was. I liked the way it sounded: Certain weather is not recognised by the land it is practised on; funnel clouds ...”

“... was mature enough to understand that God hates children as much as he hates the rest of us. Ben Marcus’s new novel, The Flame Alphabet, is a commentary on the Elisha text, but a commentary that fulfils both obligations of flame: the text’s illumination is also its destruction. A novel concerned with children and language and the terrors wrought ...”

“... sexuality is irrepressible. Explaining Williams’s stories in his introduction to this volume, Ben Marcus is deadpan: ‘They are about people. Foolish, foolish people.’ Another category where verbal effect depends on compression and timing is the joke. The only online clip of Williams shows her reading in a bar; you hear the appreciative audience ...”

“... of their banal utterances.’ At the centre of One Day are a married couple, Priya Patnaik and Ben Tennyson. He is a schoolteacher and cookery writer; she works in radio. They live together in North London, in a flat just off the Holloway Road, with their son, Arjun Tennyson Patnaik, or Whacka, as he is more usually known, after the way he mispronounces ...”

“... the lovers hang desperately on to their individual identities in the face of mortality. As Leah Marcus argues in The Politics of Mirth, ‘cavalier’ poems like Herrick’s ‘Corinna’s going a maying’ urge the abandonment of a strong sense of identity, in the spirit of the older ritual forms of carnival. In the wake of Bakhtin’s enormously ...”

“... a pickpocket, a scabby refugee from the bombed-out countryside who’d sneaked up on them in the Ben Thanh market?The professor starts calling her by a name that isn’t hers, leaving her to wonder if there was another woman in his life, someone she knew nothing about. He brings her a rose, when it was his habit to give her improving books rather than ...”

“... containment or non-containment of social and moral tensions and contradictions. Let us begin with Ben Jonson, the source of the title, whom Lake eventually gets to, rather like the dragon in Robert Graves’s poem. Jonson had the most turbulent, up and down existence of any of Britain’s greatest writers. It’s just possible that he was the son, born ...”

“... Duane Jones was just the best actor who auditioned for the role. Jones’s character, Ben, isn’t very heroic: he’s brimming with authority, but has as little clue as anyone else how to deal with the undead hammering at the doors, and his clear priority is to save himself – which no one else, in the movie or the audience, is in any position ...”

“... Marcus Tullius Cicero was murdered on 7 December 43 BC: Rome’s most famous orator, off-and-on defender of Republican liberty and thundering critic of autocracy. He was finally hunted down by lackeys of Mark Antony, a member of Rome’s ruling junta and principal victim of Cicero’s dazzling swansong of invective: more than a dozen speeches called the Philippics, after Demosthenes’ almost equally nasty attacks on Philip of Macedon, three centuries earlier ...”

“... a cultural moment that otherwise poked fun at it or tried to avoid it. In an interview from 1977, Ben Harney, who played the Tin Man in the Broadway production, said that ‘for the first time in a long time people were getting Black theatre that wasn’t hitting them over the head with anger and militancy. This was a show that had universality, and it was ...”

“... supporters was Robert Briscoe, a Jew who later became Lord Mayor of Dublin (as did his son Ben Briscoe), but he was never a minister in any Fianna Fáil government because of what Keogh calls ‘an undercurrent of hostility towards Jews in the country which even de Valera disappointingly adjudged better left unprovoked’. Although the Free State was ...”

“... that already in early 19th-century Yorkshire, children were being baptised with diminutives: Fred, Ben, Willie, Joe, Tom. Everywhere, some names could be given to both girls and boys – Hilary, Evelyn, Lesley, Happy, Providence – and the practice of using surnames as forenames was well established. Particular groups have periodically used this customary ...”

“... away. She booked us passage on the Benvalla, a ship run by the once famous, irrevocably Scottish Ben Line, based in Leith and trading primarily with Asia. The Ben Line operated a fleet of mainly cargo vessels which also took some passengers. There were fourteen passengers on board the Benvalla and the journey was supposed ...”

“... violence and illegal arms’ against Antonius he showed himself ‘fanatical and dangerous’. Marcus Antonius has had his history written largely by his enemies: Syme treats him with sympathy, pointing out that a careless and disorderly private life did not prevent him from showing on occasion ‘consummate skill as a statesman’, besides courage and ...”

“... from prison early. But he was, because some politician wanted to show their “compassion”.’ Marcus Luttrell, a Navy Seal known from the Afghanistan invasion for his (possibly exaggerated) heroism, host of a television talk show produced by the conspiracist Glenn Beck and a former ‘special guest’ on Duck Dynasty, fired up the hall when he suddenly ...”