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“... up in Rochester, Upstate New York (coincidentally the birthplace of another sui generis writer, John Ashbery). Abandoning an early ambition to become a composer, he graduated from Haverford College, and then worked for a year on Wall Street. Attracted by ‘the prosperous-seeming world of books’, he had short stories and ‘quasi-philosophical ...”

“... The red coat, or perhaps it’s a dressing-gown, is what he is wearing in the 1881 portrait by John Singer Sargent, Dr Pozzi at Home. It is a swashbuckling, very theatrical portrait, one that would make anyone curious about its subject. Almost any other sitter would be devoured by that bright red coat, floor-length with a giant collar, but Dr Pozzi easily ...”

“... too much plod or pointless infidelity. The exceptions are the always excellent Alastair Reid; and John Felstiner, who devoted a whole book to the problems of translating Neruda, especially ‘The Heights of Macchu Picchu’, a spectacular section of Canto general. The Essential Neruda is therefore a very welcome arrival. ‘Essential’ is probably too bold a ...”

“... professional. In the mid-17th century, the Royal Society established a committee including Dryden, John Evelyn and Edmund Waller, ‘to improve the English tongue’. Nothing much came of this. In 1658, Milton’s nephew Edward Philips had published a New World of English Words which reached its seventh edition by 1720. Swift busied himself with the state of ...”

“... a national body of verse. When she does mention Scottish anthologists, editors and publishers – John Bell (The Poets of Great Britain), Robert Anderson (Complete Edition of the Poets of Great Britain) and Thomas Campbell (Specimens of the British Poets) – Bucknell doesn’t comment on the way they promoted through their works’ titles a ...”

“... to be a rock in anybody’s idea of a stream. He incorporates ‘change’ and opportunity. Jim Gray, an engineer, recognised the moment when it came. If he was to reach the peak, he would have to abandon that long-haired ex-sailor with Vietnam patches on his sleeves, leaving him to die in the snow: ‘He could no longer be the same old Jim ...”

“... water, full in face Trafalgar lay; In the dimmest north-east distance, dawned Gibraltar grand and gray; ‘Here and here did England help me, – how can I help England?’ – say, Whoso turns as I, this evening, turn to God to praise – pray Yonder where Jove’s planet rises silent over Africa. Militaristic? Imperialistic? Was Browning really so sold on ...”

“... and passionate studies of economy, politics and culture by social historians as intelligent as John McEwen, John Foster and Ian Carter, writers as good as John McGrath and Tom Nairn, politicians as energetic as Robin Cook and Jim Sillars. To write for it felt like good militant fun (I ...”

“... in order to please his father: Rachmaninov’s Third. When one-armed piano teacher Cecil Parkes (John Gielgud) tells Helfgott that no one’s ever been ‘mad enough’ to attempt it in the Royal College of Music’s annual competition, the student replies: ‘Am I mad enough, Professor? Am I?’ Apparently so, because he has a nervous breakdown as soon as ...”

“... in a chapel full of nuns delicately made-up.’ The picturegoer remembers how she hated ‘the gray-faced nuns’ at her convent school. ‘The only difference between this movie and life was that here the public knew it was being deceived.’ She turns to her lover – ‘an ordinary man, less real than Lord Southsea’ – and hears him speak ‘Movie ...”

“... 1642, she recorded paying five shillings ‘for two leaps for my greate coatch mare, and my gray mare, of Mr Shewards & Mr Brabazon horses’. No great reader, Jeffreys’s most expensive purchase was the works of the Bishop of Exeter at thirty shillings, but usually she preferred secular books, especially Greek and Roman histories in translation. A ...”

“... and impossibility – of watching yourself from the outside is what drives The Picture of Dorian Gray, or Frankenstein, or the films of David Lynch. To watch yourself from outside is, according to the textbook, to watch yourself as dead – and both Hall and his hero understand this all too well. Holed up in his flat, Eric Sanderson reads letter after letter ...”

“... Thomas’s death the family fractured. Frances ran away, abandoning the children to her parents, John and Alice Jennings. When she reappeared two months later it was to take over the lease on the Moorfields stables and transfer it to her new young husband, William Rawlings. Her parents watched as she drove their once prosperous business into the ...”

“... mostly American group made up by herself, Walter Berry, Howard Sturgis, Morton Fullerton, John Hugh Smith, Percy Lubbock and a few other initiates. She emphasises the man’s ‘quality of fun’, and her James is ‘the laughing, chaffing, jubilant yet malicious James’, not ‘the grave personage known to less intimate eyes’. Like the letters of ...”

“... necessary to discard Augustan formality (Wordsworth used for odious comparison a sonnet in which Gray wrote that ‘reddening Phoebus lifts his golden fire’), so the rejection of a decayed Palgravian romanticism, and the stale or weakened language in which it found expression, were prerequisites of writing serious poems a century later. Eliot’s praise of ...”