“... substance, more power and grim humour, more knowledge, than ten average novels put together. Kenneth Marchal Toomey, the narrator, is a novelist, born in 1890 and in his mid-eighties when we last hear from him. His lifetime takes in a lot – World War One, the Easter Rising, the aviators Alcock and Brown. Prohibition, Fascism, Nazism, World War Two, the ...”

“... above where the eagles soared.’ A main problem for the West Indian novelist, according to Kenneth Ramchand, is how to handle the ‘language of the master’ – the white predecessor who stands ambivalently as former slave-owner and literary source. Heath’s method is to thin his style to a minimum, owing the ...”

“... friends climbed over the walls of the inaccessible estate to be photographed, all of them wearing white masks, beside it. Woodward does not include the Broken Column – perhaps because it took a posse of Surrealists to grasp its weirdness. Ruins pull our responses in two directions. They offer concrete evidence, of the architectural orders of classical ...”

“... man’. Clara Saint, however, spoke to the French border police, one of whom happened to be a White Russian. Plain-clothed officers took up position close to where Nureyev was sitting with his minders. All he had to do was go up to them and ask for freedom, which he duly did. There was a brief tug-of-war, with Nureyev in the middle, until the French ...”

“... no matter what its political stripe, will be able to run South Africa without sharing power with white civil servants, policemen, generals and businessmen. The rhetoric about the welding of disparate groups into a new nation is, at best, harmless window-dressing; taken seriously, it would be extremely dangerous, for it would mean the enforcement of a ...”

“... repudiating them. Academic critics are often enamoured of Wordsworth’s youthful allegiances. Kenneth Johnston’s The Hidden Wordsworth is almost mystically committed to the idea of his youth. Its prologue declares that, with all the reverence (and matching irreverence) the poet has inspired, there is one image, or story, that we have not seen fully ...”

“... well have been allowed a gentler landing. But he was not any of those things: he was a Westerner, white trash, didn’t go to college, and worst of all, was a California phenom, a national success, the literary darling of the young. The long knives were well due in making an appearance. Brautigan came from the Pacific Northwest, born in Tacoma, Washington in ...”

“... of the current po-mo poster boys, Tao Lin, with his anaesthetised declarative sentences, and Kenneth Goldsmith with his ‘uncreative writing’, such as a transcription of a year’s worth of daily radio weather reports. Foucault notes: ‘Today’s writing has freed itself from the theme of expression.’ Even the title of the book unchains the ...”

“... was an immediate if controversial hit. Some avant-garde and progressive voices championed it – Kenneth Tynan, Marxism Today – but there was plenty of criticism too. T.C. Worsley, theatre critic for the New Statesman, thought Delaney’s success merely reflected the fashion for working-class voices; Salford’s city fathers complained that she was ...”

“... as Traven’s knowledge of the IWW (the International Workers of the World, or Wobblies). The poet Kenneth Rexroth, himself of German descent and an ex-Wobbly, suggested that Traven was in fact a German-American, brought up in a community where the mother tongue was spoken, and that at some period in his life before going to Mexico he had been a wandering ...”

“... missiles carrying nuclear warheads. But in the course of a week of intense discussions in the White House, Kennedy and his advisers gradually turned away from proposals for an out-of-the-blue bombing raid on the missile sites and settled instead for a blockade of the island (soothingly called a ‘quarantine’) by the American Navy with an unspecified ...”

“... that I could need £100. I’d go down there and he still wouldn’t pay me, and yet he’d have a white Rolls Royce with a chauffeur sitting outside waiting to take him wherever he wanted to go. But who says he paid the chauffeur? Not settling debts is hardly unheard of in Old Etonians. But Robert was a first-generation Etonian, and might conceivably have ...”

“... the two children laughed at each other in a brotherly way, and their teeth were equally white.’ A live animal is so much more fascinating than the splendid doll, for reasons that underlie the erotics Marquard Smith explores in his peculiar and highly equivocal study. Yet a doll promises everything the rat in a cage can give and more: she/he/it can ...”

“... countenance’ (though not before offering him one last chance to burn a finger in her ‘white flame’). When Thayer learned of their marriage, he was ‘nettled’, even though he was already engaged to the beautiful 18-year-old Elaine Orr, whom John Dos Passos described as a ‘poet’s dream’ and about whom Cummings would write hundreds of ...”

“... and there’s a touch of Sheila Graham in the Garden of Allah, with Fitzgerald drunk on the floor. Kenneth Anger is deep in conversation with Nathanael West at the counter of Schwab’s drugstore, Joan Didion’s desert air is wafting in under the door, and Ben Hecht is taking notes. Stein has an ear for Americana at its most bewildering, most politically ...”