“... in the coastal village of Deià in Mallorca. There they had their second child and they asked Robert Graves to name him – Philip. ‘The Relics’, which appeared in Mathews’s first collection, The Ring (1970), is a set of variations on imaginary landscapes in yellow and red, bringing to mind the Phrygian Midas, and a landscape turning to clanking ...”

“... all the stylish whimsy of this bizarre catalogue, its compiler can’t help but be seduced. Wallace Stevens’s enigmatic half-seen ‘necessary angel’ has eclipsed the Voltairean wag, and Weinberger has slipped back into the poetic calling.This​ contemporary breviary moves on to saints, who, unlike angels, have personalities and biographies of ...”

“... shaman Harry Smith, is arcane, but the critical world has been primed for its reappearance. Robert Cantwell’s When We Were Good and Greil Marcus’s The Invisible Republic – recent accounts of the curious development of American folk music – both devote considerable space to the Smith collection, making impressive claims on its ...”

“... there was some ideological coherence in Marvell’s career is starting to gain acceptance: John Wallace, Annabel Patterson and Warren Chernaik have all concentrated on secular political thought. Stocker is the first critic to bring to Marvell the new awareness in recent historical writing of the centrality of the book of Revelation for 17th-century ...”

“... They were fun to read despite the fact that their meaning was not always easily dislodged. Wallace Stevens’s observation that we often admire something long before we understand it comes to mind here. The cycle called ‘Games’ is the best-known, and some of those Popa played are familiar and some are his own invention. This is ...”

“... to repeat Conan Doyle’s own roll-calls of the SPR’s most droppable names (Alfred Russel Wallace and William James belonged, and Freud was a corresponding member), Daniel Stashower doesn’t discuss the wider impact of the spiritualist subcultures that emerged in the wake of the war that cost Conan Doyle a son and a brother. Like other recent ...”

“... or desire. There are few scenes more melancholy in 19th-century fiction, or in paintings such as Robert Braithwaite Martineau’s The Last Day in the Old Home, than the enforced sale of household goods. Thackeray made a specialism of clearance, in Vanity Fair and then again in The Newcomes; George Eliot followed suit, at length, in The Mill on the ...”

“... the whole thing like a campaign advert directed by John Ford. In Milwaukee, I bumped into Robert Auth, a member of the New Jersey General Assembly, who began telling me and a Swedish journalist that the Republican Party had always been all about surviving and staying on course. ‘We’re shocked,’ he said, ‘but we’ll go about our ...”

“... contemporary rival Tennyson, and the principal 20th-century poets, including even Yeats, Hardy and Wallace Stevens, let alone the various fashionable Modernists whose reputations are now rightly in rapid decline.’Such an estimate may do justice to the scale of Browning’s work. Whether it comes to terms with Browning’s actual identity as a poet is much ...”

“... and like any good scout was both pathologically self-assured and incurably naive. David Foster Wallace said that he spoke like ‘Jimmy Stewart on acid’ (though Lynch’s addictions were the diner-appropriate kind: coffee, sugar, cigarettes). Whatever the contradiction – mainstream avant-gardist, reactionary visionary, pervert in a top-buttoned shirt ...”

“... Delmore Schwartz, Truman Capote (on Kerouac: ‘that’s not writing, that’s type-writing’), Robert Brustein and James Dickey (‘Howl is the skin of Rimbaud’s Une Saison en Enfer thrown over the conventional maunderings of one type of American adolescent, who has discovered that machine civilisation has no interest in his having read Blake’). Riding ...”

“... sorts of American writers: the young Allen Ginsberg paid him homage and copied his style, while Robert Lowell, for example, looked to Williams for a freer, more democratic manner than his rivals could offer. Though he remains an acquired taste in Britain, Williams’s position in American poetry, at least, seems assured. That position rests, above all ...”

“... 1982, Terry McCluskie and his friend Raymond Reynolds picked a fight with a total stranger, Robert Ford, and stabbed him to death. Ford was 15 years old and had just taken his girl-friend home after spending an evening at a local Citizens’ Band radio club. McCluskie, also 15, and Reynolds, 14, had spent the evening drinking and were on their way to a ...”

“... says, in ‘a race to the bottom driven by ever-receding profitability’. The Nazi politician Robert Ley said that ‘there is no longer such a thing as a private individual.’ Half a century after Ley’s suicide at Nuremberg, Morgan, as editor of the News of the World, ensured that this was the case in Britain. Every parasite has its parasite. Every ...”

“... well above the knee’. That, too, is familiar. In They Came like Swallows, the older boy, Robert, is a natural athlete, but one of his legs has been amputated and he wears a false limb. And in So Long, See You Tomorrow, the narrator describes how, when his brother undressed at night, ‘he left his artificial leg leaning against a chair.’ In that ...”