“... futile and meaningless – that man is ‘a finite piece of reasonable misery’, in the words of William Drummond of Hawthornden, a good poet who was also a great plagiarist, and a great seeker of shelter in books – but that an absolute order might be felt for, or invented. That order was eventually discovered in the teachings of Christianity. When he ...”

“... to withdrawal in Vietnam was meant to ‘neutralise’ supporters of the Southern Democrat George Wallace, who was trying to get the 1972 nomination. If Nixon pulled out too quickly, he warned, Wallace’s 13 per cent of the 1968 vote – he had run as an independent candidate on a segregationist ticket and split the ...”

“... LRB (5 August). The idea for the poem came from a comment in an excellent book by Tony Sharpe on Wallace Stevens, in which he speculates on the flocks of pigeons mentioned in the last lines of ‘Sunday Morning’: And, in the isolation of the sky, At evening, casual flocks of pigeons make Ambiguous undulations as they sink, Downward to darkness, on ...”

“... care ‘reform’.When I want to recall those Leckford Road days, I can turn up a letter that William Jefferson Clinton wrote, on 3 December 1969, to a certain Colonel Holmes of the University of Arkansas Reserve Officers Training Corps. Clinton wanted to clarify his attitude to the military draft:Let me try to explain. As you know, I worked for two years ...”

“... was also important. Acker was a charismatic live reader, and followed the example of her hero, William Burroughs, by touring clubs and music venues, building fans among people who didn’t usually buy books. Transgression too was important for such an audience, transgression and a sense of lineage with other transgressors, a secret club for fans to ...”

“... he had, Hemingway did not serve in the Italian Army. It was about this time, we are told, that William Faulkner wore a Royal Canadian Air Force officer’s uniform with wings, and cultivated a limp, to none of which he was entitled. All this may sound very silly, but war is a great breeder of lies and the young Hemingway was behaving like a lot of other ...”

“... Bannatyne Manuscript of 1568 contains six poems that are his, or have been ascribed to him. But William Ringler has pointed out that five of these poems are later additions to the manuscript, and the sixth is ascribed, apparently in a later hand, simply to ‘Montgomery’ – a sufficiently common name, and the attributions in this manuscript are in any ...”

“... an instructor in the English department at Yale. Pearson was a correspondent of Ezra Pound and Wallace Stevens as well as F.O. Matthiessen, the Harvard scholar and cousin of his pupil, who had taken his own life earlier in 1950 under a cloud of threats over his leftist leanings and homosexuality. Pearson was in these years at work on a study of Nathaniel ...”

“... Kennedy brothers) conducted a campaign to discredit King. The organisation’s assistant director, William Sullivan, compiled from the Bureau’s wiretaps and bugs a tape of the noises of the civil rights leader’s extramarital activities. He sent it to King with a letter threatening to expose him; purporting to be a ‘Negro’, the letter-writer proposed ...”

“... of Stafford House and Bridgewater House, and still do in Hertford House, now the home of the Wallace Collection. Most collectors of Richter and Basquiat today have no interest in art before Picasso, and their suppliers often know little about art before Impressionism. Enthusiasts for and authorities on modern music, by comparison, have a far greater ...”

“... Salam on electroweak gauge theory; and, of course, Darwin and the undercelebrated Alfred Russel Wallace on evolution by natural selection. Every instance of what has been called ‘simultaneous discovery’ lends credence to the notion that the individual does not matter in the course of science, or matters in a very different sort of way from authorial ...”

“... the medical reformer and Julian Huxley the socially-conscious scientist helped to set up Unesco. William Beveridge, a Liberal, saw his Welfare State largely enacted; Creech Jones, chairman of the Fabian Colonial Bureau which had been founded in 1940, became the minister responsible for the colonies; and the ‘garden city ideal’ of the Town and Country ...”

“... everything on poetry attaining to the condition (the concreteness) of the visual – I think of William Carlos Williams – find that when it comes to writing about the images they admire most the task ends up destroying their parti pris. ‘No ideas but in things’ is the war cry. Bruegel is chef de file. But the best poem in Williams’s collection ...”

“... for ‘Communist’. They attained their apogee in the 1948 third party campaign of Henry Wallace, an operation managed by ‘very, very progressive people’. Not only the threat of Soviet rivalry but the emergence of facts about Stalin’s tyranny destroyed a mood of comity based on expediency and fiction. Another circumstance was no less ...”

“... He was a friend of W.B. Yeats’s wife, George, and of Joyce’s wife, Nora; he corresponded with Wallace Stevens, who dedicated a poem to him. Richard Aldington called him ‘a paradox of a man if ever there was one. He looked like a priest in civvies.’ McGreevy chatted and gossiped a lot, knew a great deal about art and music and literature and was ...”