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“... Gusting across, not waiting for the lights, just one more loose end of the working day leaking home through the cracks in the traffic, at six already dark ... Across, between a humped WIMPY-jacketed back hugging two carrier-bags from the off-licence, and a shock mascara’d teenage mum gone grey in my headlights (her buggy-bound astronaut bumping down to the breath of exhaust on his cheek ...”

“... vastness of India by exporting an elderly English widow as a minor Hindu deity. Of the poets here, Philip Gross and George Szirtes follow Conrad’s route. Fleur Adcock, re-importing a wicked Englishness from the Antipodes, favours Mrs Moore. The others work variations on Forster, with the occasional Conradian divertissement. The son of ‘a Displaced ...”

“... Norman MacCaig’s Voice-over, three years on from his Collected Poems, has 58; Cat’s Whisker by Philip Gross (three years on) 41; Jouissance by William Scammell (two years) 38; Disbelief by John Ash (three years) 55; Ken Smith’s Wormwood, a collection of poems written during a spell as a writer in residence in Wormwood Scrubs (one year), 30. The ...”

“... have profited from being written out of speculation, preferably in a well-endowed library. Philip Gross and Sylvia Kantaris combine their considerable gifts to create a colourful peopled world, lit up by ‘magic realism’. Intoxicated by the topography they have invented, they nevertheless satirise the notions imposed upon the exotic by ...”

“... from the Poetry Editor at Faber, Craig Raine. There’s more Martianism in another Faber debut, Philip Gross’s The Ice Factory. Clogged webs are slack-strung tennis nets; convulvulus, frail horn gramophones for bees – the opening lines assert, pulling out all the stops, but also requiring too much of that comma (which stands in for a plural verb ...”

“... music, multi-media happenings, what have you. But bless me, it seems I was wrong. For if John Gross isn’t duplicating for a later generation what the Earl of Birkenhead did for mine, I don’t know what he and the marketing managers at Oxford University Press think they are doing. What readers can they think they are catering for, if not such callow and ...”

“... after one night of marriage), nausea at the cultural dominance of ‘dead civilinations’, and gross maltreatment by the Cambridge male economics establishment, left her with a lifelong passion to ‘remake’ the world in a more humane, rational and scientific mould. This passion infused all aspects of her intellectual career. As a professional social ...”

“... write a cinema companion to Lessing’s Dramaturgie. He was perfectly capable of engineering such gross nasties as Jud Suss and Der Ewige Jude, but fiercely resisted demands from other Nazi leaders, notably Rosenberg, for generally tougher propaganda and more of it. The UFA studios continued to the end to churn out a great deal of basic ...”

“... As good a picture as any on which to hang thoughts about Philip Guston is San Clemente, painted in 1975. It shows Richard Nixon on the Californian shore. His pink, phallic nose droops between gross, grey, stubbled testicular cheeks. A tear runs down one of them. Bloodshot eyes swivel from under a black hedge of eyebrow ...”

“... affront to good taste was his unembarrassed embrace of neoliberal capitalism. In an era of gross inequality he made his money by outsourcing production, globalising his consumer base, and manipulating selected markets. All of which makes Hirst’s reinvention of himself as a kind-hearted philanthropist surprising. Is he trying to flatter ...”

“... or generalisations of outdated or poor scholarship. One common assumption is that a war of such gross proportions must somehow have been ‘inevitable’ and had profound, general causes: thus, as is asserted in one of these books, ‘those who studied the politics of power had seen it coming for a decade and it was an open secret that a “great ...”

“... stood facing the east, that stupendous disharmonious facade, without rule or proportion, with its gross friezes, its impossible volutes, its capering delirium of incorrect curves, its horrible ogives and embrasures, a brutish, shapeless hulk, something like an exhumed crypt, as if the builder had sought to objectivise in stone and cement the disorder of his ...”

“... with presenting an external, perhaps critical, perspective. Nevertheless, in The Lives to Come, Philip Kitcher provides an outstanding illustration of what the philosophy of science can contribute to public understanding. Molecular genetics, the topic of Kitcher’s book, is surely the area of contemporary research with the greatest potential relevance to ...”

“... Proust wrote too many letters: he thought so and so anyone might think, as Philip Kolb’s expanding series of annual volumes edges towards the writer’s death, in 1922. Sheer numbers would not have mattered had they been stronger letters, but Proust’s correspondence is too much of it mechanical or emptily ingratiating, the one remaining exercise of the social virtues by a man who had taken to his bedroom (with occasional querulous sorties late at night to the Ritz Hotel) in order to be alone with his asthma and the prodigiously radiating manuscript of his novel ...”

“... Amis professed to hate ‘abroad’, but he was only intermittently a cultural nationalist. When Philip Larkin, in his capacity as librarian, canvassed him in 1960 for his views on the export of manuscripts, he received the usual robust reply: I will sell any of my manuscripts to the highest bidder, assuming such bidder to be of reputable standing, and I ...”