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“... writes: ‘Yes, I’d like that very much. That really would be something to look forward to.’ Frank was already weakened and wasted by throat cancer, but my suggestion that we go to watch some cricket at Fenner’s did seem genuinely to appeal to him. There wasn’t much to look forward to by this point. On the appointed day the weather was kind, and ...”

“... Frank Kermode is too multifarious a writer to have anything as dogged as a theme for his critical work; too sane and stealthy to boast of anything as limiting as an obsession. But there are persistences, continuities, as he calls them in the title of one of his books. There is an interest in difficulty, for example, and especially the difficulty of understanding – either oneself or others ...”

“... The Enchanter because he was so busy at the time; or perhaps he changed his mind. In 1967 Andrew Field in his book Nabokov: His Life and Art gave a brief but accurate account of the piece, translating two longish passages with similar accuracy, judging by the closeness of his version to Dmitri Nabokov’s. However, Mr Nabokov seems to have fallen out with ...”

“... the Railway Station’: ‘And the man in the handcuffs suddenly sang/With grimful glee …’ Frank Auerbach to William Feaver And the man in the handcuffs suddenly sang With grimful glee: ‘This life so free Is the thing for me!’ And the constable smiled, and said no word. Thomas Hardy, ‘At the Railway Station, Upway’ I remember​ the first ...”

“... that gravitational waves should exist. If the mass that is the source of the gravitational field suddenly shifts, for example in a supernova explosion, the theory implies that gravitational waves will spread through the medium, analogous to an earthquake producing seismic waves in the solid earth. Behaviour of this kind is familiar in ...”

“... to the monarchy ran deep, he was never one to miss out on a party. So in June 1977, Howe and Frank Crichlow, owner of the Mangrove, a Notting Hill restaurant and meeting place for activists, decided to throw a street party with a difference: a celebration of African Liberation Day. Instead of the ubiquitous Union Jack bunting, All Saints Road in Notting ...”

“... was held up or confiscated by customs; it proved impossible to get epidemiologists out into the field because they were teaching and practising privately to make ends meet, because the local directors refused to have their staff beyond peremptory recall and, principally, because in a Moslem country, where a man’s wife is in purdah, if an epidemiologist ...”

“... and work instead ‘by means of an aggregation of fragments arranged as within a mosaic or a field of force’. Readers of fiction as well as readers of poetry can therefore expect ‘a rough, memorable ride’ over open territory, and must contribute their own share to the apprehension of senses that remain, under the openness, ‘laconic or ...”

“... scholar with a theory about Judas Iscariot. He would be the last to say he is first in the field with a theory about Judas, but he can plausibly claim to be unique in having appeared before classes and congregations dressed as he supposes Judas to have been at the moment of the Crucifixion, and keen to defend his actions against what he knew would be ...”

“... Ihadn’t​ been expecting to bump into Frank in one of the remoter stacks of the Cambridge University Library. This is where they keep the back numbers of old scholarly periodicals, a morgue only likely to be violated by those, like me, who now spend their days picking over the cairns left by academic labourers seventy years ago ...”

“... and the catch-phrases of uncles and schoolfriends. Here he confesses his affection for Sid Field; it would not be easy to name more recent comedians likely to win his approval. He quotes a letter from Robert Graves which, although it is about the poetry, gives an accurate representation of the way Fuller often sees his ...”

“... sings football hymns. Finally, like the brayers at the opera, they get into the act, storming the field and touching or slapping the players as they run for cover. At the end of the last Test the English wicket-keeper seized a stump as souvenir, and a supporter of the losing side tried vigorously to wrest it from his hands: he had been part of the show, and ...”

“... not less often an epic, hero, seamed all over with the wounds of the market and the dangers of the field ... The romance of fact, indeed, has touched him in a way that quite puts to shame the romance of fiction.’ Even as late as 1961, apparently, the native American type was awaiting fulfilment in fiction. Take a gangster, wrote Mary McCarthy in an essay ...”

“... Read and of the Italian polymath Mario Praz, then teaching at Liverpool, whose work in the same field Eliot greatly admired. In 1937 Eliot pronounced them ‘pretentious and immature’. Should one now agree with Schuchard that they contribute to our understanding, if not of Donne, then of Eliot? Eliot had already published some famous brief remarks about ...”

“... subtlest and most entrancing of Bridget Riley’s early paintings, Static 2 (1966), consists of a field of black spots arranged in a pure grid, 25 by 25, across a white square. Static, as the title says, and yet the painting isn’t inert: a lovely sense of inner movement is conveyed by the way the spots, which are not pure circles but mildly oval, are ...”