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“... from when I first met him twenty-five years ago. Dame Judi is here and Michael Williams, Dame Wendy, Lindsay A., Ron Pickup and Anna Massey, Keith Baxter, Percy Harris, who’s 90 herself, and Ralph Richardson’s widow, Mu. I am happily seated between Jocelyn Herbert and Merula Guinness, with both of whom one can be happily silly. ‘You see,’ says ...”

“... each lasting about five seconds, and instead of learning to use them, I’d just throw them at the wall in some order and the result would be a sparkling and disorganised mess, a free-form string of disjointed but attractive thoughts. My teacher set out to fix this problem, and taught me a method of planning I still use to this day. With every piece, no matter ...”

“... reappearing in the most disconcerting way. One of the most amusing essays in this collection is by Wendy Clark, a lesbian, who has tried time and again to set up alternative communal living establishments which will provide a true home without the horrors of family life. What particularly distresses her is the way all the members insist on going back to their ...”

“... The ideological pressures built up in America over the past twenty years have ruptured the wall that ought to separate the virtual realm of art from the real realm of life. People have got into the habit of confusing the speculative fantasies of made-up stuff with things that actually happen – they have come to treat books and pictures as though they ...”

“... excess. The rhetorical forces of primitive Christianity confronted the demonic powers of Wall Street. In this rhetoric there was ‘a certain gravitas, an undercurrent of apocalyptic finality … foreign to our sense of things today’. Religious language raised the stakes in the struggle against concentrated capital. This was true for industrial ...”

“... of the nation-state is founded, ultimately inspiring Donald Trump’s notion of a ‘city’ wall to keep out the barbarian Mexican horde, and Brexiters’ desire to ‘take back control’ from insurgent European bureaucrats. But what if the conventional narrative is entirely wrong? What if ancient ruins testify to an aberration in the normal state of ...”

“... for Christmas in 1989, and his ‘real education’ began. He learned about the ‘invisible wall’, the rule that prevents a player of Super Mario Bros from going backwards in a game that moves, like words on a page, strictly from left to right. There is no reversing time. The leaker of government documents can’t go home again. Everyone grows up with ...”

“... No roofs, no town, Maybe no men, But yonder where a lather-rinse of cloud pours down The spiked wall of the sky-line, see, Scafell Pike, Still there. It is school-magazine stuff, with its once-modishly free form and its mixture of original, slightly self-conscious metaphor and mild archaism of diction. Yet the second poem, ‘Beck’, far more imaginative ...”

“... conscripts of the Argentine junta invade the Falklands, Sam rejects the package deal. He puts up a wall map of the Atlantic Ocean, sticking coloured pins into it to mark the British advance with his unqualified approval. ‘He’s just regressed,’ Sam’s wife tells Hooper. ‘He’s like when I found him. When he had a horrible plastic bust of Churchill in ...”

“... by the philosopher Jacques Maritain, who had moved permanently to France. Every inch of interior wall had been covered in murals by a young French painter, against which Lourié looked finally at home. He had been one of Akhmatova’s ‘husbands’ for a while. Tenuous communication had not diminished their emotional attachment. ‘All your photographs look ...”

“... The water drip-drops from his zig-zag briefs; behind him, discreetly positioned on the bathroom wall, is a crucifix. On the sleeve of 1999 (1982) he reclines naked like a Playboy centrefold, in a neon-dappled boudoir. (His hobbies include horse riding, watercolours and pop eschatology …) On the sleeve of Dirty Mind he wears little more than a ...”

“... a plank missing from the footbridge, natives grading into Portuguese without shame, a grilling sea-wall, its pavement burst up by the waves, houses built on white piles, with chickens ducks cookery and washing sharing the basement, a desolate and grilling public garden, and the sea full of floating brown pennies of oil. This short passage shows a spontaneous ...”

“... Collections of the notable figures are beginning to appear: J.H. Prynne, Barry MacSweeney, Wendy Mulford, John James, with decent selections of Bill Griffiths, Allen Fisher, Douglas Oliver. And glimpses of many others, the reforgotten: John Temple, Anna Mendelssohn. It is a truth, unilaterally acknowledged (Cambridge and environs), that Raworth is the ...”

“... pink and white. Yellow pom-poms of japonica, horticultural cheerleaders. In a corner, under a high wall that gives away the previous identity of this public park as a decommissioned energy-generating plant, retired workers sway, stiffly and slowly, in t’ai chi ballets. I’m fascinated by the elderly Chinese couple who circle every morning for more than an ...”