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“... and a fan – even more remarkably – of William Godwin’s English Jacobin thriller, Caleb Williams. It was quite possible to combine Enlightened criticism of the Ancien Régime with a counter-revolutionary hostility to the politics of perfectibility. The quest for a political utopia provided scope not only for the amelioration of human distress, but ...”

“... more than mark that wildness’s grave. Being by trade a poet of plain language – William Carlos Williams would be another hero, also George Oppen, also Eileen Myles – Nelson finds her artistic focus drawn in two main directions. On the one hand, she crafts her words until she gets them to ‘facet’ as accurately as she can: ‘How to explain that for ...”

“... immaculately planned funerary procession, by limousine and gun-carriage, out of Westminster to St Paul’s Cathedral, had the appearance, on the news feeds streaming unwitnessed into the cafés and pubs of the Thames Gateway, of a triumphalist police outing, a reunion for veterans of the Battle of Orgreave. A reunion attended, in true British fashion, by a ...”

“... But, most of all, its collage of vignettes – as though written by a hallucinated William Carlos Williams – were meant to be self-erasing illusions in an illusory world. ‘In my poetry,’ Gu Cheng once wrote, ‘the city disappears and what appears instead is a piece of grazing land.’ In its way, it is the Taoist version of the slogan the Situationists ...”

“... and the movements that were to emerge out of the late 1960s, or connect the thinking of Raymond Williams, E.P. Thompson, Stuart Hall et al with other strains of thought that also challenged the accepted borders between the political and the personal. So, while Sandbrook has considerable fun with the chaotic Albert Hall poetry festival of June 1965 (the ...”

“... hard to manage. But he had a mixture of brute and poet that Kazan urged on Selznick and Tennessee Williams.That was just the start, for in rehearsal Kazan built up Stanley’s role, and lavished attention on his guy. In the text, it is Blanche’s play – and in its subsequent history it has become a vehicle for spectacular actresses. But Kazan was edgy at ...”

“... not the first to tell the story of his life: an unfinished memoir by his younger sister, Margaret Paul, was published in 2012, but it was missing a crucial chapter – about Wittgenstein’s return to Cambridge in 1929 – and wasn’t especially good on the philosophy. Misak, a philosopher at the University of Toronto, draws on extensive archival ...”

“... Y-e-a-h!’ It’s crowded with names (Dizzy Gillespie, Sammy Davis, Marian Anderson, Paul Robeson), with flashing neon (WONDER BAR, CASBAH, SHALIMAR), with headlines, snatches of speech, children’s rhymes, lists of goods for sale (‘Groceries/Suits/Fruits/Watches/Diamond rings/THE DAILY NEWS’), with ...”

“... has been the focus of attention for a great range of thinkers, including Nick Srnicek and Alex Williams in Inventing the Future, David Graeber in Bullshit Jobs, Paul Mason in Post-Capitalism, Rutger Breman in Utopia for Realists, and Peter Barnes in With Liberty and Dividends for All. UBI is definitely having a ...”

“... about American affairs for NOW which East Coast radicals, like Dwight Macdonald and Paul Goodman, were always assuring me should be disregarded as entirely mythomaniacal; they were nevertheless extremely entertaining. Reading his poems at the same time as his personal letters and his scurrilous public letters, I soon developed the image of a ...”

“... of the highly successful Hazell series by the (again) pseudonymous P.B. Yuill (in fact, Gordon Williams and football manager Terry Venables writing as a team: the significance of the bizarre surname eludes me). The author of Duffy is Julian Barnes, assistant literary editor of the Sunday Times and television critic of the New Statesman, and formerly ...”

“... letter-writers. The most interesting are not the ones written to his brother from the Peter and Paul Fortress describing his mock-execution and pardon, about which he made little at the time, or the account he later gave his brother of his time in penal servitude. These things were all to be written up later by the novelist. Unlike Lawrence, Dostoevsky is ...”

“... especially outside Ireland, may wonder at the gap in sensibility between Heaney (born in 1939) and Paul Muldoon (born in 1951), but to read about Heaney’s first years, his ‘nineteen-fifties/Of iron stoves and kin groups still in place’, is to see that the two poets do come from different generations: ‘I was well and truly formed,’ Heaney says, ‘by ...”

“... audiences howling into their tumblers for years. To someone like me who grew up thinking Kenneth Williams was the perfect English gentleman (and imagining Russell Harty and Lily Savage to be the perfect Northern blokes), the words of Norman Tebbit are not just mad in the way you’d expect from him, but also profoundly at odds with something outrageously ...”

“... nothingness’ – help us realise that Gunn has been reading Sartre, but do not help us to see St Paul in a painting by Caravaggio, which is what they are meant to do. But in two of the later poems in this early selection – ‘Considering the Snail’ and ‘My Sad Captains’ – when Gunn uses a seven-syllable unstressed line, the conflict between ...”