“... knocking at my door in Magdalen, anxious to study Powellism as a British variant of the George Wallace phenomenon in America. As a student, Schoen was already running his own polling firm, Penn and Schoen Associates, which has since blossomed into one of the most successful such outfits in the US, having just guided Clinton back from the dead. I worked ...”

“... act of homage to Ford as both great writer and inexhaustibly fascinating personality – to borrow Wallace Stevens’s words of the dying Santayana, as ‘master and commiserable man’. Ford was, in crude ordinary parlance, a liar, and Mizener made no bones about saying so and deploring the fact. It was a charge perfectly commonplace among all who knew ...”

“... about all those experiences and more. She explains that she had ‘no idea what to make of’ Wallace Stevens’s ‘The Bird with the Coppery, Keen Claws’ when she read it in her twenties. She then asks ‘what was the work the poem was demanding of me?’ and answers her question with ‘it was to inhabit the poem, to live willingly in its ...”

“... are chapters on black authors (Ralph Ellison, Zora Neale Hurston, Toni Morrison, James Baldwin, Robert Hayden, Jay Wright) as well as on 12 women writers. Toni Morrison (‘a child of Faulkner’) is given shorter shrift than she deserves and told off for being ideological, but some of these chapters – particularly the one on James Baldwin’s prophetic ...”

“... milk at my Scottish primary school. I remember the blizzard around the classroom the day Mrs Wallace said it to me, a snow-scene dense enough to make the end of Joyce’s ‘The Dead’ appear like a moment’s inclemency. The poet Hugh MacDiarmid had a feeling for the freezing lives of sheep, and he resurrected, or to some extent invented, the words ...”

“... of answers about the Yugoslav War. Democracy-promoting journalists like Michael Ignatieff and Robert Kaplan were pleased to learn from Djilas that the ethnic violence was the result of Tito’s failure to democratise the country when he had the chance. But they didn’t consider more disquieting problems presented by Djilas. The perceived selling-out of ...”

“... appeared in 1972, and Harold Bloom called it the most distinguished book of American poetry since Wallace Stevens’s Collected Poems came out in the mid-1950s. It was ‘a major imaginative event’, John Hollander said, and John Ashbery – in his first piece for the New York Review of Books – hailed Ammons as an ‘American original’. ‘I was born big ...”

“... forces’: an indication that it intends to fight more proxy wars. The defence secretary, Ben Wallace, announced that UK armed forces ‘will no longer be held as a force of last resort, but become a more present and active force around the world’.Perhaps the most significant commitment was the deployment of a new aircraft carrier group in ‘the ...”

“... via the New Yorkers, to strike a chord with a younger generation of poets such as John Forbes, Robert Adamson and John Tranter, who included the entire sequence in the Penguin Book of Modern Australian Poetry (co-edited with Philip Mead) published last year. In their introduction to the volume they argue that ‘these unsettling works of the imagination ...”

“... revenant too canny to leave any footprints in the dust. (‘He’s come down from Kellogg or Wallace – Idaho camptowns, feathery silver markets on the far tip of the right wing. He’s got a couple of quarts of blackberries in his arms, picked with the morning dew, five hundred miles away.’ Edward Dorn.) Even Ben Watson, whose poodle parlour is wall ...”

“... cities and calling for the destruction of White Society.’ Pierce was active on behalf of George Wallace’s American Independence Party in the Presidential campaign of 1972, but Wallace in his turn was shot and crippled by a would-be assassin. It was a low period for American neo-Nazis. Quite apart from the fact that all ...”

“... LaRouche, the real ‘existentialist’ honchos on the boardwalk aren’t Adorno or Arendt, but Robert McNamara and the Kilgorean figure of William Westmoreland. This volume bears little sign of the bourgeois deviationism to which Marcuse fell prey in the Forties, though it may be coming in one of the promised sequels. These were, after all, the years when ...”

“... now I live in Washington and I see the old Rhodes Class of those years going about its business: Robert Reich running the Labour Department and Strobe Talbott managing US-Russian relations from Foggy Bottom and Ira Magaziner trying to recover from his moment as person-in-charge of Bill and Hillary’s health care ‘reform’.When I want to recall those ...”

“... and its allied disciplines shut up shop and go home. So we have the evolutionary anthropologist Robert Foley: ‘For centuries, humans have wondered about why humans are the way they are, and they’ve turned to philosophy and to religion to answer that question.’ But humans should stop doing that: Darwin allowed us to set philosophy and religion aside ...”

“... here. More than two hundred years later, this sense had not yet faded; with a cheeky rhyme, Robert Burns attributed such devices to the devil: ‘Then you, ye auld, snic-drawing dog!/Ye came to Paradise incog/An’ play’d on man a cursed brogue.’ By the time Burns was writing, ‘brogue’ also commonly described ‘a rude kind of shoe generally ...”