“... and some, like Lutz, cult figures, who came of age in the late 1970s and 1980s, including Raymond Carver, Amy Hempel, Barry Hannah, Diane Williams and Mary Robison.One of the best accounts of Lish’s influence is in David Leavitt’s roman à clef Martin Bauman; Or, a Sure Thing. He appears in the first paragraph ...”

“... and perky little houses’ for ‘mean and perky little souls’, as Clough Williams-Ellis had it in 1928. ‘Mean and perky’, in that order, may describe Maisie and Josh Evans, Dale’s couple who hatch a scheme to take in ‘dear old souls’ as ‘paying guests’ in their spare room, before tricking them into altering their wills ...”

“... published An ‘Objectivists’ Anthology in 1932, A Novelette and Other Prose by William Carlos Williams, and two books by Pound: How to Read and The Spirit of Romance. It was while the Oppens were in Europe that the word ‘Objectivist’ came into existence. Pound had foisted Zukofsky on Harriet Monroe as a guest editor of Poetry for an issue which ...”

“... and then at Santa Barbara. There are some good gags and gossip, particularly when Tennessee Williams and Gore Vidal hit Hollywood: ‘Yesterday, there was a big party for Tennessee at the Duquettes’. Mary Pickford was there, stoned, and Edwina, Tennessee’s mother, said to her: “Do you remember your long yellow curls?” Gore said: “She is the ...”

“... many philosophers of a wide range of political shadings (Michael Oakeshott, Richard Rorty, Bernard Williams, Martha Nussbaum) who breathe the air of the tower far more easily than they do that of the stove. Maybe if this tendency continues, Montaigne will one day come to seem as significant a figure in the history of philosophy as Descartes. There is still ...”

“... Land, reveal a rhythm rather than imposing one. Perhaps only Gordon Lish’s transformations of Raymond Carver’s stories impose rhythm in that way. Meadow’s first film, Portrait of Deke, made in 1987, didn’t really come together, didn’t acquire its tone or form until the editing stage. At high school, inspired by Andy Warhol’s screen tests, she ...”

“... through the Cold War. Unlike his kindred spirits in Britain and France – Isaiah Berlin and Raymond Aron were more formidable thinkers – Schlesinger had a particularly intimate relationship with power. But one of the fascinating paradoxes of Richard Aldous’s biography is how slight Schlesinger’s influence in Washington actually was, despite his ...”

“... war? Only when I thought about it, or read about it – the drawings in When the Wind Blows by Raymond Briggs, depicting the slow deaths of Jim and Hilda Bloggs from radiation poisoning, were seriously disturbing – or saw anything about it on TV.1 I loved WarGames (1983), the strangely reassuring movie in which Matthew Broderick prevents a rogue computer ...”

“... an end point; rather, he felt society would be in a continuous state of development.’ He shared Raymond Williams’s notion of a Long Revolution, even if Williams himself, as Thomas-Symonds points out, was not a fan (‘it takes one Welshman to know another’). He also had a different conception of public ownership ...”

“... people!’ The usual suspects, or most of them, were on board – Stevens, Eliot, Crane, Pound, Williams, there was even a poem of Lowell’s – but not with their standard anthology pieces. About 80 per cent of Thom’s choices either had Eros in the title or were directly concerned with the troublesome deity. Nearly half the poets in the collection were ...”

“... though he was pushing fifty by the time it saw the light of day in French. His thesis supervisor, Raymond Aron, described its style as ‘Proustian’, but as one slogs through its five hundred-odd pages (merely a stump of the French original), that verdict comes to seem increasingly hard on Proust. As with Thucydides and Habermas in English, the question ...”

“... intellectuals and scholars (Alain Locke, Rayford Logan, Merze Tate, E. Franklin Frazier, Eric Williams) who together would subject the global racial order to excoriating analysis.Bunche spent a dozen years at Howard, finding his wife, Ruth, among his students; the school also proved a springboard for an astonishingly forward-looking research agenda. At a ...”

“... Vote for Eisenhower. SECOND ANNOUNCER: A paid film. In 1964, the Goldwater campaign was using Raymond Massey to front a television ambush of Johnson’s record: We are fighting a no-win war in Vietnam, a war we don’t want to win. Well, as an American I don’t like it. I don’t like our policy and I don’t like no-win wars. Barry Goldwater wants to ...”

“... studies: he discovered, for instance, the fine perspectivist and occasional architect Raymond Myerscough Walker living in a vagabond caravan in a wood near Chichester, his archive stored in his car, a near sunken Rover. Such persons are much more than also-rans. They are the substance of a parallel history of Stamp’s creation that abjures ...”

“... much relish. She was ‘a good drinker’, Leader says of the Swansea original of Mrs Gruffydd-Williams, and while one feels this is very much an Amis-type judgment, it’s not one Leader dissents from – or dissents from sufficiently, drink and good fellowship equated throughout. Never having been able to drink much, partly through not having been ...”