“... Here in Los Angeles county is the largest complex of military aerospace plants in the nation: Hughes, Lockheed, Northrop, TRW, McDonnell Douglas; here until a few years ago was a powerful manufacturing base with car and tire plants and, to the east in Fontana, the only integrated steel plant on the Pacific slope. Here are strange sub-cities like Vernon, a ...”

“... object is to transmute matter into spirit. ‘Writing is primarily an experience of language,’ Robert Creeley said, and Popa reaches back to the folk tradition of riddles, charms, proverbs, nursery rhymes and exorcisms for clues about how to make poems. What he is after are the eyes and ears of the anonymous folk poet who could hear flowers growing, the ...”

“... to earn the right to the luxury of practising his art’. Heaney represents in similar fashion Robert Lowell’s year in prison as a conscientious objector during the Second World War. Lowell was ‘earning his poetic rights by service in the unpoetic world of jail’. Elsewhere, Heaney asks: ‘What right has poetry to its quarantine?’Heaney’s notion ...”

“... a stone or in a factual document, the search for her leads only to dreams and fantasies. Bettany Hughes attempted an archaeological quest in her Helen of Troy (2005), but was left wistfully hoping that Helen’s tomb might be discovered one day. Maguire finds traces of Helen of Troy everywhere, far beyond the poems and plays in which she is a character, but ...”

“... on the periphery. Nor did many in the outside world realise quite what was emerging in Russia. Robert Lansing, Wilson’s secretary of state, whom Tooze rescues from the obscurity to which he is usually consigned, pointedly noted that this was a new type of despotism, intelligent rather than ignorant like the tsarist one, and to be feared. Wilson preferred ...”

“... or rather my studied self-contempt is now nearly a disease.’ Finally in 1913 he meets Robert Frost, newly arrived from America, starts writing poetry and joins the army, to die four years later in combat in France. It is a frantic and harassed life in many ways, but Wilson tells her story at just the right pace, with patience and clarity, though ...”

“... and Hertfordshire as well as Glamis, the Scottish estate granted to an ancestor, Sir John Lyon, by Robert II in 1372. While not especially wealthy by the standards of the aristocracy of her day, they can have had no anxieties about their place in society, any more than Elizabeth, tucked snugly in towards the bottom of a large and affectionate family, seems to ...”

“... 20th century, among them Elizabeth Hardwick, Jean Stafford (these two had been better known as Robert Lowell’s wives) and Lucia Berlin, whose luminous short stories seem to me as good as anyone’s. Now Picador have published Blue in Chicago, a collection of stories by Bette Howland, born in 1937, a Jewish writer from a working-class neighbourhood in ...”

“... to the possibility – and it shows up.’ Her poems first came to light when she sent them to Robert Hayden, the first African American poet laureate. She won a Discovery Award, which was presented at the 92nd Street Y, followed by a dinner in Claudette Colbert’s apartment. This prize led to the publication in 1969 of Good Times – the first of ...”

“... formative influences. He read widely, and quickly absorbed the work of Léopold Senghor, Langston Hughes, Gwendolyn Brooks and Amiri Baraka, whose poetry drew on vernacular speech patterns and the rhythms of jazz and blues. Through New Beacon Books, a radical bookshop and publisher in North London, Johnson met the Trinidadian poet and activist John La ...”

“... well-known fact that all a working man would ever do with a large award of damages was buy a pub. Robert Stevens in a footnote cites a nice antidote from a law lord in 1833: ‘Here is a contract made by a fishmonger and a carrier of fish who know their business, and whether it is just and reasonable is to be settled by me who am neither fishmonger nor ...”

“... novelists (Hilary Mantel, Sarah Waters, Madeline Miller), classicists (Robin Lane Fox, Bettany Hughes), historians (Tom Holland), who salute her muscular resurrections of the classical world, and gay men who see her as a pioneer in her writing about homosexual relationships. Along with hundreds of other gay men, many of them closeted, the writer and ...”

“... dollar bills into a shredder in order to disguise their provenance in the empire of – Howard Hughes? Marilyn Monroe fucked both Kennedy brothers before taking her own life, if she did indeed take it. Frank Sinatra raised money for the Reagans and acted as at least a confidante to the First Lady. Norman Podhoretz’s son-in-law Elliott Abrams, while ...”

“... up to the south door, only later realising it wasn’t lichen but chewing gum. 23 March. That Ted Hughes should have got into Poets’ Corner ahead of Larkin wouldn’t have surprised Larkin, though he must surely have a better claim. Two deans back, and not long after Larkin’s death, I remember Michael Mayne saying that Larkin had earned his place on the ...”

“... at Aldermaston for six months during 1955; and a group of declassified US documents obtained by Robert Norris of the Natural Resources Defence Council in Washington. It may well be that there are errors in our account – given the habits of secrecy and misinformation which prevail among British governments it could perhaps hardly be otherwise – but what ...”