“... Blam (1971) with these anxious imaginings. The town is Novi Sad, on the banks of the Danube, fifty miles north-west of Belgrade. It’s the 1950s, but Blam, in his thirties, feels he is ‘the fossil of a long forgotten age’, walking a ‘city full of ghosts’. As he looks down onto Main Square from his rooftop, or takes a tram along the boulevard, the ...”

“... canonical works of black male autobiography that have surely shaped Gates’s political thinking, Richard Wright’s Black Boy, for instance, James Baldwin’s The Fire Next Time and No Name in the Street, and The Autobiography of Malcolm X, Colored People is not an angry, still less an incendiary work; its predominant tone is nostalgic and ...”

“... and highly perceptive, it’s the first book for a long time that I’ve wanted to put beside Richard Usborne’s Clubland Heroes. The Nine Literary Studies of Dorothy Sayers are, in fact, less literary than biographical and bibliographical. They detect mysteries about things like publication date or the pseudonymous works of her husband. There are a lot ...”

“... Australia after taking holy orders. He was given a living embracing a radius of about four hundred miles to the north of Adelaide. This turned out to include Ned Kelly’s hideout. The Reverend Platts rode out, found him and persuaded him that it would look well if he came regularly to church. Kelly started attending; then he stopped, and when the parson rode ...”

“... paper, typeface devised God knows when by fuck knows who, blurbs by the well-respected likes of Richard Howard, Carolyn Forché and Franz Wright – is enough to cure one of the idiocy of reading poetry in translation. Because: why shouldn’t they all be like that? It seems harder to gain admission to a children’s playground than to publish a book of ...”

“... myself: every winter, a Dutch performance artist and musician called Guido van der Werve runs 32 miles from an art gallery in Chelsea to Kensico Cemetery in Valhalla, upstate New York. Where he lays a bouquet of chamomile flowers at the tombstone of Sergei Rachmaninov … Running to Rachmaninoff, the piece is called, and van der Werve runs because ...”

“... shyness meant she would always hate it, that both her parents were academics (Ellmann’s father, Richard, was Joyce’s biographer, her mother, Mary, a celebrated Tennyson scholar). The unspooling of all of this is intercut with shorter sections, written in full sentences, describing the journey of a cougar that sets out across Ohio to find her stolen ...”

“... cadet training unit at Heysham, every Wednesday or Thursday night we would walk the two or three miles into Morecambe, and go to the dance in the Floral Hall. From about eight to midnight, several hundred men and women, nearly all in uniform, were packed in under a pink and gold dome, and wandered round in a haze, searching for a partner. I danced badly, and ...”

“... detailed links with Shakespeare’s plays, but I believe it is necessary to set two passages from Richard II and Henry IV Part I next to this sonnet – which, as Vendler says, is the first to remark on ‘a true flaw’ in the friend. In Act III of Richard II, Bolingbroke and his party confront ...”

“... and leading news correspondents Crane met in Cuba such as Charles Michelson, Ernest McCready and Richard Harding Davis. These are rich materials but at the same time they are incomplete and sparse. Crane was not a prolific letter-writer and he left no diaries or memoir. Further confusing matters was Crane’s first biographer, Thomas Beer, whose Stephen ...”

“... ageing appearance and its latent power is disconcerting: it still pulls you to London at 125 miles an hour. I’ve experienced this spectacle many times over, in the town where I grew up. Those engines were new in the 1970s. Unlike Simon Bradley I lack the trainspotter’s enthusiasm for locomotives, and I’ve had some horrible journeys on that ...”

“... words heave weights into the air. The tension has its roots in his intellectual education and, as Richard Read demonstrates in Art and Its Discontents, the books record a young writer gradually turning from the late-Victorian Hegelianism of his Oxford education towards the 20th-century aperçus of psychoanalysis. Stokes addresses his central concern one ...”

“... Upper Ontario, From Long Before’, is dedicated to that other Grand Old Man of American Letters, Richard Eberhart, almost exactly Warren’s coeval (Eberhart was born in 1904, Warren in 1905), who has also published a new book of poems. Eberhart, unlike Warren, loves highways: If I drive a thousand miles I feel good. All ...”

“... involves a break with Deconstruction. Norris argues in this book, as he has argued before, that Richard Rorty’s formalist reading of Derrida as a dissolver of truth and objectivity is wrong: Deconstruction may expose particular areas of aporia or vertiginous bewilderment in the logic of interpretation and explanation as these things are practised in the ...”

“... hundreds of heavily armed and armoured men lunged at each other on horseback over several square miles. Excited horses ridden by excited people who know how to do it well and enjoy it are terrifying if you are standing in the way. Kings were nervous of the unpredictable political consequences of tournaments, and the Church was decidedly unhappy about the ...”