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“... 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 ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... act of homage to Ford as both great writer and inexhaustibly fascinating personality – to borrow Wallace Stevens’s words of the dying Santayana, as ‘master and commiserable man’. Ford was, in crude ordinary parlance, a liar, and Mizener made no bones about saying so and deploring the fact. It was a charge perfectly commonplace among all who knew ...”

“... knocking at my door in Magdalen, anxious to study Powellism as a British variant of the George Wallace phenomenon in America. As a student, Schoen was already running his own polling firm, Penn and Schoen Associates, which has since blossomed into one of the most successful such outfits in the US, having just guided Clinton back from the dead. I worked ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... edition of this book. Nor, in some sense, can it even be attempted. The Lyons translation, as Robert Irwin explains in his introduction, returns to the Arabic version that Burton used, restores the interjected outbursts of song and bawdy that Galland skipped, and sternly avoids the free and easy habits of some of his successors. It clearly aims to ...”

“... are chapters on black authors (Ralph Ellison, Zora Neale Hurston, Toni Morrison, James Baldwin, Robert Hayden, Jay Wright) as well as on 12 women writers. Toni Morrison (‘a child of Faulkner’) is given shorter shrift than she deserves and told off for being ideological, but some of these chapters – particularly the one on James Baldwin’s prophetic ...”

“... milk at my Scottish primary school. I remember the blizzard around the classroom the day Mrs Wallace said it to me, a snow-scene dense enough to make the end of Joyce’s ‘The Dead’ appear like a moment’s inclemency. The poet Hugh MacDiarmid had a feeling for the freezing lives of sheep, and he resurrected, or to some extent invented, the words ...”

“... via the New Yorkers, to strike a chord with a younger generation of poets such as John Forbes, Robert Adamson and John Tranter, who included the entire sequence in the Penguin Book of Modern Australian Poetry (co-edited with Philip Mead) published last year. In their introduction to the volume they argue that ‘these unsettling works of the imagination ...”

“... revenant too canny to leave any footprints in the dust. (‘He’s come down from Kellogg or Wallace – Idaho camptowns, feathery silver markets on the far tip of the right wing. He’s got a couple of quarts of blackberries in his arms, picked with the morning dew, five hundred miles away.’ Edward Dorn.) Even Ben Watson, whose poodle parlour is wall ...”

“... cities and calling for the destruction of White Society.’ Pierce was active on behalf of George Wallace’s American Independence Party in the Presidential campaign of 1972, but Wallace in his turn was shot and crippled by a would-be assassin. It was a low period for American neo-Nazis. Quite apart from the fact that all ...”

“... LaRouche, the real ‘existentialist’ honchos on the boardwalk aren’t Adorno or Arendt, but Robert McNamara and the Kilgorean figure of William Westmoreland. This volume bears little sign of the bourgeois deviationism to which Marcuse fell prey in the Forties, though it may be coming in one of the promised sequels. These were, after all, the years when ...”