“... repugnant – artfulness of any kind seems. ‘In the presence of the violent reality of war,’ Wallace Stevens wrote, ‘consciousness takes the place of the imagination. And consciousness of an immense war is a consciousness of fact.’ It’s some such argument that lies behind the 1939-45 revulsion against Modernism, or indeed any kind of artistic ...”

“... of the work, and paeans to library architecture and stacks appear within the poems. Howe quotes Wallace Stevens’s ‘poetry is a scholar’s art’ while speaking of Emily Dickinson, but also (of course) herself. The library is her forest, and Howe is – with just one letter swapped – Hope.Recent textual scholarship focusing on Dickinson’s ...”

“... great deal of light on the possibilities of reviving written Scots is cast by the festschrift for David Murison, Scotland and the Lowland Tongue. The collection contains a number of pieces of very high quality, which is perhaps not surprising, since few people would want to present anything but their most respectable work to Murison, the wittiest of ...”

“... You​ ought to be in a kindergarten,’ a Canadian nurse exclaimed to David Jones, aged twenty, awaiting transfer home in July 1916 after being wounded in Mametz Wood. Even a decade later, photographs show a wary child or an understudy for an adult. Prudence Pelham, the staunchest of his extended female fellowship, described him as ‘completely unsexed ...”

“... ego in the novel as an excerpt from his supposed poem dated 1860, ‘The Garden of Proserpine’. David West in the Times Saturday Review for 24 August 1991, show-casing the piece in a panel headed ‘Reading a Poem’, invited us to see here ‘many of the characteristics of the best Victorian verse: the vivid and disturbing pictures, the rich organ music ...”

“... published between 1917 and 1920. ‘The investigators came up with some bitter conclusions,’ David Weingast wrote in 1950:They found the Times guilty of having misled its readers on one of the most stupendous events in modern history. The paper had failed in its primary responsibility to publish accurate, reliable information. Whatever its purpose, the ...”

“... self-effacing pursuit of capital-I Imagination, after the models of Baudelaire, Mallarmé, Wallace Stevens and H.D., would cause her to be left behind as the age moved towards a model of political and feminist poetries. But her 500-page Collected Poems belongs among the achievements of 20th-century modernism, a sphere overlapping almost nowhere with ...”

“... it is not animism, or pathetic fallacy, but a magical instability. Roth writes as well as anyone (Wallace Stevens, say) about attractiveness: anyone who has read Weights and Measures will remember the effect on Lieutenant Eibenschütz of the tinkle of the gypsy Euphemia’s earrings; from the name Lutetia (in Confession of a Murderer) ‘there emanated a ...”

“... there has been a tendency to find the key to the universe in the curl of a teenager’s lip, in David Bowie’s lipstick or Janis Joplin’s hair. The shapings of history, the contours of time and place, are to be found in the stirrings of drum and guitar; or, deep as dimples, high as a quiff, on the heads of King and Queen Rockers from this time and ...”

“... are the relevant passages – they’re famous, but I do not think we have got them right. To David Sylvester in 1960 (this is a few minutes on in the interview from ‘content is a glimpse’ and I think it takes up the same train of thought):Most of [my recent pictures] are landscapes and highways and sensations of that, outside the city – with the ...”

“... wife of Lee Harvey Oswald, without thinking what, exactly, they would have to say to one another. David Pecker, the CEO, who later ran the National Enquirer, complained that John didn’t interview popular people such as Princess Diana or the imprisoned Mafia boss John Gotti. But he did interview the Vietnamese general Võ Nguyên Giáp. He spoke to Marion ...”

“... of infamous goodies. Meanwhile, FDA criticism will probably earn a few more adherents thanks to David Leverenz’s Manhood and the American Renaissance. It is better than most such books because, for one thing, he is at times a competent if constricted close reader, while being at heart resentful that he is required to be one at all by certain of the works ...”

“... about the ‘true’ writings of Karl Ove Knausgaard, or the huge amount of attention paid to David Shields’s polemic Reality Hunger. Time and again we hear about a new desire for the real, about a realism which is realistic set against an avant-garde which isn’t, and so on. It’s disheartening that such simplistic oppositions are still being put ...”

“... held for the best students – to Deerfield’s ‘resident writer’, a not very able poet called David Morton, who was so impressed that he sent them to Poetry magazine, which accepted two of them. The poems appeared in the November 1945 issue. Ashbery was distracted from noticing their publication by the fear he would be expelled for homosexuality, but he ...”

“... when it was rescued by the leadership of Jo Grimond and the Suez fiasco. Since then, as William Wallace shows, Liberal politics has revolved around a series of attempts to achieve a realignment of the Left with a view to restoring the Liberals to a major role. Realignment usually gets off the ground at times of electoral revival and renewed crisis for ...”