“... Brodie, gave rise to a late-life idea of her as a treasurably naughty grande dame, all genteel camp and classily to-the-point prose. Others, however, saw her as a glamorous point of contact with developments on the Continent. She showed an interest in what no one then called metafiction even in her earliest short stories, and her favourite among her books ...”

“... he chose well, working with most of the best Hollywood directors of the time: Hawks, Zinnemann, William Wyler, George Stevens, Hitchcock. In ten or so of his 17 films, he is, by anybody’s reckoning, flawless. It’s not surprising that John Ford never showed an interest; the ‘manly’ directors with whom Clift did work suspected he was gay, and, in John ...”

“... 11 September undid centuries of Christian teaching and made revenge respectable again, just as William Harris is over the top when he opines: ‘In the United States, views about revenge seem to have sunk to a level appropriate to a neolithic village.’ But it is troubling how much public talk of revenge there is at present. This study of rage restraint ...”

“... radicalism of pre-war Greenwich Village, to Trotskyist left-oppositionism, to the conservatism of William F. Buckley’s National Review, seemed to exemplify the failures of socialism in the 20th century. In his final years Eastman himself was sometimes overcome by a sense of personal futility; he complained on his death bed that his life had been ...”

“... The Life and Letters volume reprints the first biography, by his masterly literary executor William Frederic Badé. The narrative is laced with Muir’s letters, which rival Lawrence’s in the wholeheartedness of their responses to life around him and to his correspondents. In them we see a man at one with himself and with the granite, the fast ...”

“... He had inherited a family tradition of populist politics suffused with unabashed religiosity. William Wedgwood Benn had started as a Congregationalist and a Liberal: at 28 the youngest MP in the 1906 Parliament (whereas his own father had had to wait for a seat until he was 42). ‘Now Anthony has been chosen at the age of 25, so the family seems to be ...”

“... into 89, then, it carried its point. But no date will ever mark history’s high tide.In a work-camp of enthusiasts which I attended in Cuba that summer, where the ideological level was not as low as some of you may think, there was a sort of dress-rehearsal when the Warsaw Pact went grinding into Czechoslovakia. All the conventional arguments, about ...”

“... specific to the latecomer. And it’s not clear that the implacable deafness is pathological. William Gibson said the future is already with us, it’s just not very evenly distributed: someone who indefatigably comes to your house when you have crawled away in exhaustion is a social monstrosity but also, quite possibly, simply caught in a wrinkle in ...”

“... Nothing is a ‘field’ for him, there are no fences or trees in the way. The main army can camp anywhere; the avant-garde can camp anywhere else. Kermode is not even going to pretend to be an expert on age, even though he had just turned 88 when the last piece in this volume – his review of Helen Small’s The Long ...”

“... can be traced in the records of domesticated herds and their surpassing individuals. William Pitt’s report to the Board of Agriculture on the state of pig-breeding in Staffordshire in 1796 includes an engraving of an anonymous painting of a pig belonging to Mr Dyott of Freeford Manor, Lichfield. The pig’s coat is dark, the snout long ...”

“... bitch!’ in her honour. They’ve learned, Carol Burke writes in her study of military folklore, Camp All-American, Hanoi Jane and the High-and-Tight, what you learn at all the service academies: ‘that being a real warrior and hating Jane Fonda are synonymous.’* When Maya Lin’s Vietnam Veterans Memorial was built on the Washington Mall, well-organised ...”

“... Lowell and Berryman, whose work shows in every line, have had the attention they deserve, while William Carlos Williams has been slighted or ignored. Frank O’Hara, like Eliot, inherited two traditions, one American, the other French. Although he says, half-serious, ‘of the American poets only Whitman and Crane and Williams are better than the ...”

“... Not quite yet. And who but the press looks forward to the homage from the Hitchens camp: the opera buffa novelists, the prickly atheists and Muslim-baiters, the warrior intellectuals pondering their just wars? Can anything strike a harsher blow to a celebrity’s standing, dead or alive, than the thoughts of his close friends? Hitchens has an ...”

“... and inspires me and many thousands of other children with tales about families learning to camp and sail and climb and skate and smelt copper. Such for Thompson are the prime markers in the history of the Lake District. The social world in which these famous witnesses lived, from which they drew material and impetus, creeps in on the margins of the ...”

“... scenes evoked purely for their own sake. This returns us to Kleinzahler’s New Jersey precursor, William Carlos Williams, and his deceptively simple rallying cry, ‘no ideas but in things’. Of course the things that get thrown up by the New Jersey landscape are rarely conventionally beautiful, yet many of Kleinzahler’s most compelling poems work by ...”