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“... liked to seem extravagant and was often generous to writers he believed in (Dylan Thomas and George Barker received welcome gifts from time to time), he usually looked for a return on his investments. He needed always to control his beneficiaries and when crossed in finance he could turn vindictive. (In this he resembled his father, mad Sir ...”

“... by today’s ‘whenwes’ are the early years of the English Stage Company, started in 1955 by George Devine and Tony Richardson, although the theatre enjoyed at least as luminous a period from 1904 to 1907 when Harley Granville-Barker was its artistic director. The Royal Court is the perfect size for a playhouse; it ...”

“... elected, so it seemed to him, into the role of Seamus Heaney, poet. If this makes him sound like George Barker, it absolutely shouldn’t. What is attractive about Heaney’s response to his vocation is that he is never entirely happy that it is he who has been called: a childhood spent wondering how to avoid the priesthood had perhaps ill-prepared him ...”

“... Perhaps this clotted rhetoric a long way after Hart Crane is no worse than the windy rhetoric of George Barker, but it is more alien to British readers, and reminds us of Jarrell’s remark that most poets, even good ones, write badly most of the time. But this selection from the poems is exemplary, presenting the case for Jarrell as a poet at his best ...”

“... Patrick Kavanagh, who was to be approached ‘with a large whisky in one’s outstretched hand’; George Barker, first seen ‘wearing a check suit and cap, all very new, as if in the course of an attempt to prove that he was not a poet but a bookmaker’. But here too, he feels, as a poet, barely visible: the visible poets speak well of his work, but he ...”

“... of a poet who had inspired them by exhortation and example. With Dylan Thomas dead, it was left to George Barker, that other bad boy-genius of New Romanticism, to add a dash of tastelessness to the proceedings: How she must have horrified you there at the far side of the tennis net the coldblooded female who killed you with her first glance. What on ...”

“... encounters with Otto Rank, Antonin Artaud, Norman Bel Geddes (‘the P.T. Barnum of design’), George Barker and innumerable sub-luminaries of the literary world. Like Miller, many of them were supported financially by Nin, or more accurately, by her besotted husband Hugo, who on marrying Anaïs had the great good sense to become a banker rather than ...”

“... that they weren’t gushing in the manner of the New Apocalyptics, such as Dylan Thomas and George Barker, was an important element in the cultural identity of these writers in the early and mid-1950s. The bony intellectualism of Empson’s poetry, in particular, encouraged a terse, argumentative idiom housed in tightly wrought formal structures ...”

“... She was expecting another child, who was to be a dashing war hero and heartbreaker called George. Economies must be practised, with an eye to George’s future. Stephen and Andrew no longer had cake for tea, Elsa lashed herself into furies over spilled jam. Depressing Scotticisms flew from her tongue: ‘Mony a ...”

“... Working-class memory generated Pat Barker’s writing. Her early fiction presented itself as a tribute to generations of suffering and survival in the industrial North-East of England. It seemed to fall into a ready-made tradition: ‘the grit, the humour, the reality of working-class life’, Virago burbled cheerfully about Union Street (1982 ...”

“... that is good,’ Robert Southey wrote (the declaration is emblazoned on the dust-jacket of Juliet Barker’s new Life). Yet any sense of this – of the subtle, elementary qualities of Wordsworth’s verse – is rarely apparent to those who study him, and rarely apparent in the throng of books and articles and theses that continue to be devoted to ...”

“... government is the CEO of Exxon,’ he said. McNally is an energy consultant, a former adviser to George W. Bush, Mitt Romney and Marco Rubio, and a member of the National Petroleum Council. Crude Volatility would be a good title for a biography of Trump, but McNally’s book was written before the election and studiously avoids political ...”

“... might seem analogous to an attempt to trace the importance of linguistic philosophy in the life of George VI; but the attempt of a clever person to make bricks without straw is never without interest, particularly since it is the very absence of evidence which Dr Peters finds so suspicious in the first instance. You might have thought that a more interesting ...”

“... which reached him and went down well. The first came when he and his wife Jane went to stay with George Barker, in Italy I think, and Barker exclaimed afterwards: ‘That boy! He’s got a tiger in his loins!’ Karl loved that. Who wouldn’t? His friends all got to hear about it. He laughed about it in a deprecating ...”

“... the budding Berlin towards Moscow – which Berlin finally reached in 1945/6. But whether Sir George Weidenfeld has had the right idea in resurrecting his despatches, I doubt. No person, no issue is concentrated upon in depth, and the footnotes provide witless and inaccurate help (Desert Victory was not a film about O’Connor’s 1940-41 offensive, and ...”