“... at all. And she is good at describing that great tradition of our literature, from Caedman to R.S. Thomas, which transforms the parochial into the universal. A highly literate Church has not limited itself to the Word, but has scribbled its brilliant way into drama, poetry, science and fiction. Miss Drabble’s map is sign-posted all over with cloisters and ...”

“... both famous and infamous, and famous not for a few minutes but for ever. Three centuries later, Thomas Carlyle will write that but for you there would have been no French Revolution, no America. This is what happened not in a dream but metaphorically to Martin Luther, a hitherto obscure monk and professor of theology in an undistinguished university ...”

“... some, all this exposure, combined with a move to a ‘mainstream’ publisher, has been like Bob Dylan going electric, but it represents an opportunity for the most radically innovative poet now writing to extend his readership. Prynne has been compared with John Ashbery, but there is little of Ashbery’s canny slackness of tone or perspective. The ...”

“... he coedited with René Hague, and forbade their publication during his own lifetime. Now, however, Thomas Dilworth has edited them as Wedding Poems. It’s a handsome-looking volume. There are photographs of Jones and the Grisewoods along with reproductions of some of Jones’s paintings of the time. There is also extensive critical and biographical commentary ...”

“... Redding played a series of shows at the Whisky a Go Go in Los Angeles. On the first night, Bob Dylan turned up with an advance pressing of ‘Just Like a Woman’, which he hoped Redding would cover. (‘I like it but it’s got too many fuckin’ words,’ Redding said, according to another of his biographers. ‘All these pigtails and bobbytails and all ...”

“... by a backlist of Seeker foreign authors including Mishima, Moravia, Svevo, Gide, Colette, Kafka, Thomas Mann, Grass, Böll and half a dozen others, found that the whole lot added up to half Orwell’s earnings in the same period. New editions of four books have just been published, said to be ‘authoritative texts’ although in some the variants from the ...”

“... 18th century.’ He went to Eton and read English at Cambridge, where he met Nick Tomalin, Hugh Thomas, Mark Boxer and Neal Ascherson. Among the enduring friendships of his student years was that of the founding editor of the LRB, Karl Miller. McEwen and his wife, Romana, later went on a road trip with Karl and his wife, Jane, through the Blue Ridge ...”

“... In turn Herbert is freed from the burden of acting out his good intentions, the burden which made Dylan reject his original audience, becoming steadily more cryptic and spiky, and which makes Billy Bragg seem exhausted by figurehead duty. Formalist art contains the sincerity of its maker without needing to transmit it directly. That’s the theory anyway. Of ...”

“... human manner: ‘In 1849 poison achieved what the razor had failed to achieve the year before. Thomas Lovell Beddoes succeeded in killing himself. Failure seemed to have become what Beddoes was best at.’ Ricks quotes the poet’s own words – ‘From the experiments I have made, I fear I am a non-conductor of friendship, a not-very-likeable ...”

“... an almost uncanny ability to inspire musicians and find what was individual in their music. Bob Dylan, who listened to Sun radio recordings as a boy in the 1950s, described the music’s quality in Chronicles: ‘I’d always thought that Sun Records and Sam Phillips himself had created the most crucial, uplifting and powerful records ever made. On Sun ...”

“... have been a brilliant one, though hardly palatable to any but the most reticent souls, such as Thomas Pynchon. Mailer and Capote, more than anyone else, used television and the popular press to create personae in a culture where art objects and ideas are considered indigestible except in a solution of strong personality. Mailer married extensively, stabbed ...”

“... far from what would in Britain be called ‘Victorian’. Not surprising, perhaps, given how much Thomas Carlyle took from German literature and philosophy; how important Goethe was for George Eliot; how much Matthew Arnold admired German education. It is also telling how compatible a veneration for Kultur was with the Victorian values of service and civic ...”

“... seem to remember writing some dark allegorical story.Poems?No. I’d written odd poems, very sub-Dylan Thomas. I remember having or buying Thomas’s Collected Poems. I liked the whole idea of him so anything I wrote sort of resembled him, though I pretended it didn’t.Were you working quite hard in the sixth form ...”

“... exemplified, perhaps, in a literary sense, in the development of that remarkable novelist Gwyn Thomas. His first, unpublished novel was Sorrow for thy sons, bitter and angry in the suffering of 1935. By the 1950s he was producing those hilarious novels and stories, the most agonisingly funny writing in English in his time, which were not only his but a ...”

“... era of collage in all sorts of media: not just Robert Rauschenberg, but also John Ashbery and Bob Dylan. For Barthelme, it wasn’t simply a matter of playing with found forms or language. That was ‘cheapo surrealism’. Instead his stories explore situations (‘The Party’, ‘Brain Damage’, ‘City Life’) that are experienced as collage. In ‘The ...”