“... his most recent full-length opera, Gawain, has an ambitious verse libretto by David Harsent. Ted Hughes once wrote a libretto for Gordon Crosse. The Story of Vasco, whose subject-matter involves crows, is an interesting opera by a composer who has now, regrettably, stopped composing. The poet John Birtwhistle supplied David Blake with the libretto for his ...”

“... does not die. It is fascinating to notice that when the Congress for Cultural Freedom dispatched Robert Lowell to South America he refused to tell lies and play the part of CIA Virgil. Instead he freaked, sent telegrams to the Pope on the theme of ‘America as the Roman Empire’, insulted every general he met, tried to climb all the equestrian statues in ...”

“... out of the photograph itself. A year later he went to Mexico, where he hung out with Langston Hughes. It was a time of cultural prosperity, but Cartier-Bresson embraced the slums with the gusto of an aristocratic foreigner, capturing picturesque prostitutes and taking endless shots of dusty people unable to get up off the pavement. I may be alone in ...”

“... May 1914, some six months before his late efflorescence into verse at the age of 36, he wrote to Robert Frost of his longing to ‘wring all the necks of my rhetoric – the geese’. He was referring to the over-elaborate style of some of his prose writings, but his first poem, ‘Up in the Wind’, composed on 3 December 1914, opens with a version of the ...”

“... Moorhouse’s book on the Pilgrimage of Grace and have reached the point in October 1536 when Robert Aske and the huge rebel host are at Doncaster waiting to move south, virtually unopposed. It’s a campaign that would surely have changed the course of history and might even have deposed Henry VIII, though this was not the rebels’ aim. They ...”

“... is that the actual poet seems to elude both. The anecdotal richness of the first half (Noel Hughes on the schooldays, Amis on Larkin as an undergraduate, Charles Monteith on publishing Larkin, Barry Bloomfield and Douglas Dunn on Larkin the librarian, and others) neatly circumambulates the poet, who has made it clear that in a sense life began for him ...”

“... meantime not dealt so kindly with Mary Kathleen Macrory Ackland – universally known as Molly. Robert Ackland’s charisma had always had a punitive edge: he insisted that his daughter accompany him on his rounds in the surgical wards; and then afterwards, according to Warner, to the brothel he frequented, where she would be told to wait in the ...”

“... too. He found that he shared his interest in dirty books with ‘the sensitive and worldly-wise’ Robert Conquest and together they went on expeditions, trawling the specialist shops for their respective bag in a partnership that seems both carefree and innocent. Unusual, too, as I had always thought that porn, looking for it and looking at it, was something ...”

“... Marcuse pointed out in a later pow-wow with Habermas that, in common with Franz Neumann, H. Stuart Hughes and Walter Langer, he was but an understrapper in the war against German Fascism, he stayed on through the A-bomb tests on Nagasaki and Hiroshima, the flash-freeze phase of the Cold War and into the Korean War. Technology, War and Fascism assembles a few ...”

“... of English Poetry (1702), Anthony Ashley-Cooper praised it in his Characteristicks (1710), John Hughes discussed it in the Spectator (1712), Voltaire cited it in his Lettres philosophiques (1733), and in 1749 Robert Dodsley recommended memorising it as an exercise in mental self-training. In Derzhypilsky’s ...”

“... is now writing a soon-to-be-bestselling crime novel with plenty of sex and murder. Her husband, Robert, often rudely called ‘Rob’ by unthinking friends, is a highly adapted commuting machine who works in Canary Wharf and times his drive to the station to perfection. She is interesting, he is not. And they have a child, Lanny, who is both interesting and ...”

“... life is indeed sharpened by all the stories we already have. In the Guardian the historian Kathryn Hughes thought that ‘Byron was indeed someone special,’ but ‘not, perhaps, because of his poetry, which is hardly read now.’ Coinciding with this biography, an exhibition at the National Portrait Gallery, Mad, Bad and Dangerous to Know: The Cult of Lord ...”

“... Batman! These closely integrated homosocial groups do absobloodylutely love ’em. As Geoffrey Hughes noted in his excellent Swearing: A Social History of Foul Language, Oaths and Profanity in English, the more charged a swear word is the more susceptible it becomes to grammatical transformation.* This means that the boundaries between nouns and adjectives ...”

“... by them: the one naturally follows the other, as the overnight cell follows the police blotter. Robert Lowell was a rather unsavoury fellow; therefore we should not be surprised by the ‘irresponsible obscurity’ (Carey’s phrase) of his verse. In The Intellectuals and the Masses, Carey moves swiftly from quoting unpleasant and fascistic comments about ...”

“... It was reading Robert Lowell that brought me to poetry at the age of 19, in 1976. I had borrowed a friend’s omnibus edition of Life Studies and For the Union Dead, and something in me said: ‘This is it!’ I don’t remember the poem I first had that response to, but most likely it was in Part IV of Life Studies, ‘Dunbarton’ or ‘For Sale’, or perhaps ‘Waking in the Blue ...”