“... or Kurt Weill, brittle and easy, wearing their sadness lightly, unafraid of the obvious. ‘We may never ever meet again/On the bumpy road to love’; ‘Oh it’s a long long while/From May to December ... ’ Louis Untermeyer, in an enthusiastic letter written in 1926, when The Wild Party was just a naughty manuscript ...”

“... the Connaught? Naipaul’s conversation on this occasion is admirable, too. Rather than denouncing Robert Lowell’s poetry as bogus (‘His poems are very good,’ is Theroux’s interesting contribution) he has the much more brilliant inspiration that the madness was bogus. (‘Total con, total con.’ I said: ‘He goes to mental ...”

“... it would appear, although, as Martin indicates, the relations between FitzGerald and his poem may be more complex than that. He did not think of himself as a poet, though he discovered a unique way of writing a poem, a way that could never be repeated. Nor could it be improved on. FitzGerald’s endless tinkerings with his stanzas reveal that dolorous ...”

“... Swedish documents), Dame Veronica’s account of the war was scarcely challenged for a generation. Robert Ergang’s The Myth of the All-Destructive Fury of the Thirty Years’ War (1956) concentrated on the exaggerated accounts of its economic consequences. S.H. Steinberg’s The ‘Thirty Years’ War ‘and the Conflict for European Hegemony (1967), a ...”

“... facto, about his or her own work is not necessarily more valid than anything the serious outsider may say of it. But with work so interpenetrated with the writer as woman, this position cannot be held. It is best to start with something that Rosamond Lehmann herself has said about her work. In a late book, the autobiographical fragments of 1967 called The ...”

“... investigative journalism, and Ms Moorehead has had to cover a lot of ground with speed. Sir Robert Mark has praised Fortune’s Hostages as a useful handbook: ‘required reading,’ he says, ‘in the unlikely and unhappy event that kidnapping here increased dramatically.’ In the meantime, it is interesting to discover, for example, the scale on ...”

“... last year: Chris Mullin’s on the Birmingham case, Paul Foot’s on the Bridgewater case and then Robert Kee’s* on the Guildford case. Kee’s is a drier, less passionate book than the other two, partly because its prose is more visibly marked by the size-12 footprints of the libel lawyer. Once again we have a crime that cried out for vengeance, with its ...”

“... in word or in deed. They are doing a magnificent job, although the organisers of the experiment may well be having moral qualms about its effect in such areas as American energy policies and Soviet behaviour in Afghanistan. (Britain has presumably been the subject of a pilot experiment for the last thirty years). I find myself able to resist this hypothesis ...”

“... assistant curator at New York’s Museum of Modern Art when Jackson Pollock, Willem de Kooning and Robert Rauschenberg were making Action Painting famous; and he and John Ashbery, his friend and contemporary, must have felt their poetry belonged in tandem with that school. O’Hara’s ‘Why I am not a painter’ doesn’t tell us why he is not a painter, but ...”

“... drudgery as an inspector of elementary schools?’ Ian Hamilton, the author of a fine biography of Robert Lowell, has made himself a connoisseur of the pitfalls of biography since the frustrations of his search for J.D. Salinger. In Keepers of the Flame (1992) he surveyed the legal and practical impediments: the prophylactic bonfire, the deathbed ...”

“... We won’t allow people to censor our past,’ Robert Jenrick, then communities secretary, said in January. ‘It is our privilege in this country to have inherited a deep, rich, fascinating and yes, often complex, past. We are mature enough as a society to understand that and to seek to pass it on, warts and all ...”

“... morning, lying there with a broken neck.Millay rose to fame while still in her twenties. She beat Robert Frost and Wallace Stevens for the Pulitzer Prize in 1923. Although she became a proselytiser in her last decade, devoted to progressive causes to which she fitted her verses (‘not poems, posters,’ she admitted), she was still in demand for lectures and ...”

“... husband; many people thought that she had meant to seduce Bywaters into doing so. ‘Illicit love may lead to crime,’ the judge instructed the jury, adding unconvincingly: ‘You must not, of course, let your disgust carry you too far.’ In her novel about the case, A Pin to See the Peepshow, F. Tennyson Jesse suggested that the crime for which Edith ...”

“... ominous gadgetry, the endless neon and rain. But Gibson – ‘very much under the influence of Robert Stone’, as well as Thomas Pynchon and William Burroughs – was among the first to find a centre-stage role for information technology in his future scenarios. His stories were set in a world of porous borders, where multinationals and crime cartels had ...”

“... not left bereft, you know.’ And the conclusion is strangely upbeat: the future may be frightening for Fr Leahy, but only as it once was for those early Christian monks who rowed away into the unknown. All Trevor’s narrative gifts are evident in this story. The short paragraphs, cut and chiselled, are those of a puritan stylist. Vital ...”