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“... as a mere imitator. Richard Dana thought his ‘Marco Bozzaris’ was America’s best lyric poem. John Quincy Adams referred to one of his poems in a speech to the House of Representatives in 1836. Most inexplicable of all, on 15 May 1877, fifty thousand people gathered in Central Park to see President Hayes unveil a statue ...”

“... to juggle the names of explorers, famous in their day, but now known only to Arctic buffs, such as John and James Clark Ross, Rae, Pullen, Collinson, M’Clure, Austin, Ommanney, Richardson, Penny, DeHaven, Kane, Forsyth, Bellot, Kennedy, Belcher, Inglefield, M’Clintock – and names of ships, such as ...”

“... arranged. Wordsworth compared the form to a ‘convent’s narrow room’; more recently, Terrance Hayes has called it ‘part prison,/Part panic closet, a little room in a house set aflame’. The sonnet has sometimes seemed a bulwark against death, a technology that can transfer its permanence to the beloved memorialised in its lines. Think of ...”

“... as heroic, but it is also questioned. ‘Curiously enough,’ Schuyler tells Lincoln’s secretary John Hay on the novel’s last page, Bismarck ‘has now done the same thing to Germany that you tell us Mr Lincoln did to our country’. Of all the novels in the sequence, Lincoln pays most attention, though not very elaborate attention, to characters from the ...”

“... be that actually he was out-grossing even professionally dissipated souls like Jimi Hendrix). Like John Kennedy – another marmoreal prince – he was good at being popular. But Presley’s great skill, and great shallowness, was that he could make you forget what he was singing about. Death – as in ‘Long Black Limousine’; poverty – as in ‘In the ...”

“... qualified would occupy the two highest offices. In 1796 this resulted in the winning candidate, John Adams of the Federalist party, ending up with Thomas Jefferson, leader of the opposition Republicans (not to be confused with today’s party), as vice president. Four years later, the Republican ticket consisted of Jefferson for president and Aaron Burr for ...”

“... The writer Judith Kerr, who had fled the Nazis with her family and ended up boarding at Hayes Court, was asked by two girls: ‘Did your nanny have a Cockney accent? Because we’ve all been discussing it and we’ve decided your vowels aren’t pure.’ Amanda Theunissen, who was at Downe House in Berkshire in the 1950s, was ‘divorced’ by her ...”

“... and Farm Aid, and Red Wedge, and Rock the Vote, and Live 8, Coldplay, U2, the late and the later John Lennon, and perhaps almost as many good causes as there are actors. It can only be a matter of time, surely, before Eminem turns, however briefly, to Christ and begins to walk in the way of righteousness, as Alice Cooper, Bob Dylan, Marvin Gaye, Roy ...”

“... cent of the population had been born in the New Commonwealth. The National Front’s candidate, John Fairhurst, had stood in nearby Hayes and Harlington in the two 1974 elections. He wasn’t standing in Southall in the hope of securing a high vote, but because the NF thought putting up a candidate there would get them ...”

“... of its offices: ‘At this location, 122 Commerce Street, was a very large warehouse owned by John Murphey, who provided support to the slave traders in the city.’ ‘I would have preferred not to have the additional markers,’ the mayor confessed, ‘but I believe they are part of history.’ He agreed to allow them, he said, because they would ...”

“... to Léopoldville. Alexander didn’t speak French; he was close to the American ambassador, Clare Hayes Timberlake; and he made frequent overtures to the Belgian generals.William Burden, the US ambassador in Brussels, wrote to the State Department that ‘Lumumba has now manoeuvred himself into a position of opposition to the West, resistance to United ...”

“... Boston . . . Portland . . . Bangor . . . Meductic . . . Sydney, Nova Scotia . . . St John’s, Newfoundland. Then the trail goes cold: it is said he enlisted in the crew of a Danish fishing boat. It was probably during this journey that Cravan’s last extant literary text was written. A sheaf of what might be called ‘automatic writings’, it ...”

“... of log tables,’ he told me. ‘I loved doing it.’ Captain Lyman had an old terminal and a Hayes 80-103A modem that they used to connect to the University of Melbourne’s network. To keep Craig quiet while he worked, Pop, as the children called him, would let him write code. ‘I found this community of hackers,’ Wright says, ‘and I worked out how ...”