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“... philosophers) reads (Anglophone, analytic) philosophy these days. But, having just worked through Christopher Hughes’s Kripke: Names, Necessity and Identity, I am no longer puzzled. That may sound as though I’m intending to dispraise the book, but to the contrary; I think it’s a fine piece of work in lots of ways. To begin with, the topic is well ...”

“... In its fifties heyday 7000 Romaine was the operations centre of Howard Hughes’s organisation, and lent its name to an unusual document known as the ‘Romaine Street Procedures Manual’, an attempt to codify both Hughes’s memoranda and the instructions set down by his compliant lieutenants ...”

“... Far from being a lounge lizard, he is a renowned Stoic. Shall I forget the evening with Ted Hughes where Ben, confined to a wheelchair by a cruel sclerosis, listened to the poet describing a faith healer he knew? The rest of us sat congealed with awkwardness as Hughes told of crooked spines made straight, wholeness ...”

“... Christopher Logue’s War Music is not ‘a translation in the accepted sense’. It’s not clear why, having said this, he should invoke Johnson’s remark that a translation’s merit should be judged by ‘its effect as an English poem’, since Johnson was talking about translations, whereas Logue’s poem is a variety of ‘poetical imitation’ and belongs to a perfectly good tradition of English poems based on or played off against an older (often Classical) original ...”

“... politicians to talk about dreams in their speeches, but they don’t often quote from Langston Hughes, famous for his communist sympathies and irreverent poems (‘Listen Christ,/You did alright in your day, I reckon –/But that day’s gone now’). Biden was referring to Hughes’s long poem of 1951, Montage of a ...”

“... Between leaving school and going to Cambridge, Ted Hughes did his National Service in the RAF. Writing from RAF West Kirby, in the Wirral, to a friend, Edna Wholey, in 1949 – characteristically there is no date on the letter – he exults in the wild weather:Edna, I’ve seen rain and I tell you this isn’t rain, – a steady river, well laced with ice, tempest and thunder, covers all this land, and what isn’t concrete has reverted to original chaos of mud water fire and air ...”

“... or I find I lose ground ‘I am nothing, if not critical.’ The predicament is one which Robert Hughes shares with Hazlitt, of whom Keats gamely wrote: ‘if ever I am damn’d – damn me if I shouldn’t like him to damn me.’ In Culture of Complaint (a bestseller in the US), Hughes damns damn near everybody. He ...”

“... occupations include freelance entrapment and extortion, procuring girls and drugs for Howard Hughes, killing people for Jimmy Hoffa, and training Cuban mercenaries for the Bay of Pigs. Pete got in trouble with the Mafia in American Tabloid when he was caught stealing a shipment of heroin, and now has to work fairly hard to stay in their good books. In ...”

“... and then, coming towards the nearer end of the line, the dark, odd and uncouth figure of Ted Hughes. In the superb doorstop of his Collected Poems, Hughes comes across as a more diverse poet than I remembered, and in many ways a more sympathetic and engaging presence. But it’s true that a good many of his poems ...”

“... its implications. This is a good period for English poetry. Not only is there Raine. There is also Christopher Reid, whose work bears a sufficient similarity to that of Raine for one to talk of a Martian school. Arcadia, Reid’s first collection, is an elegant and original book whose virtues remind one of the world of painting. It is not surprising that ...”

“... had struck a loudly answering chord from the settled centre! That is the predicament of Larkin, of Hughes, of Heaney: each of them initially supposing himself a marginal person speaking up for marginal people, yet forced to recognise – as the royalty statements convey their gratifying yet unnerving message – that the stance he had thought of as special was ...”

“... about Morris’s ‘unspeakably sick’ activities – in the words of the then Labour MP Beverley Hughes – peaked in 2001, when a one-off Brass Eye episode that sent up the hysteria surrounding paedophilia resulted in a small-scale media frenzy. By then, though, he’d mostly abandoned fake news and moved on to more opaque, quasi-dramatic material ...”

“... in 1975 and died, a multi-millionaire, in 1981. Not so his minister for public works, Davis Hughes, a former schoolteacher from rural Orange who is the villain of Drew’s story and, like Utzon, is still with us. Drew charges, with convincing documentation, that Hughes intended even before the election to get Utzon ...”

“... themselves than as furnishing the perfect polemical points de repère; over the years the poems of Christopher Middleton, of J.H. Prynne, and of C.H. Sisson, have all found themselves not so much constituting the grounds of Davie’s argument as figuring in it. But Milosz is too stubborn and faceted to be functionalised, even in the most high-minded way, and ...”

“... place.Over the next ten years he became a star. He initially worked as a contract player at Howard Hughes’s RKO. (Hughes, a control-freak, had Mitchum’s house bugged: Mitchum, with characteristic contrariness, always insisted he liked Hughes.) His best roles were largely in film noir ...”