“... masks, pirate flags – could have been translated directly from the pages of Richmal Crompton’s Williams the Lawless, hinting at safe nursery havens lurking in the undisclosed backgrounds of some of these class warriors. Verso have performed a dubious service by packaging these petulant yelps like the latest punk revival pressing. They have granted an ...”

“... to death and resurrection in the novelist’s work. Coincidentally, in 1982, Andrew Sanders’s Charles Dickens: Resurrectionist was published. Dickens was the subject of Garrett Stewart’s previous book, and is the main author discussed in Death Sentences. But his line is different from Sanders’s, who locates the Dickensian ambivalence about death in ...”

“... for human betterment.’ But something is going wrong when Hill ends up sounding like Shirley Williams: if he has spoken of poems as presenting both terms in an antiphonal ‘drama of reason’, this implies a process, rather than a final product with a detachable political moral. Moreover, it can be questioned whether Hill really does give the opposing ...”

“... has still not been taken on board in Britain: they engage with a post-Poundian poetic tradition (Charles Olson, Edward Dorn, Robert Duncan, George Oppen) of a kind that gives modern American poetry its variety and experimentalism. Gunn and Davie are included in both anthologies, but to read their collected poems (the next step after reading Davie’s superb ...”

“... that gave monarchists another count for the bill of indictment. In The Famous Tragedie of King Charles I (1649), Cromwell was goaded to ever greater wickedness by the New Model Army chaplain Hugh Peter, his sidekick ‘i’the Machiavilian world’: the future Lord Protector’s outsize red toper’s nose, a staple of royalist humour, eventually takes on ...”

“... for the most part equally addressed. Though the central fictional character of Burr, the narrator, Charles Schuyler, is fairly one-dimensional (his guilt about betraying Burr, for example, is reiterated rather than developed), the novel’s principal historical figures – Burr, Jefferson and Hamilton – are vividly imagined. Burr is the Vidal figure (in the ...”

“... called Charlie Laughton whom he first met in a bar (not to be confused with the British actor Charles Laughton). Pacino writes that he ‘knew’ straightaway that Laughton, who worked at the Herbert Berghof Studio, was destined to be his teacher. Laughton, who was described as a ‘sensory’ acting coach, became a father figure to Pacino (he was about ...”

“... chapters she’d best skip. He explains, finally: ‘In her incisive analysis of Psycho, Linda Williams argues that the film should be considered “quintessentially postmodern”. In the same way, I should like to argue that my book about Psycho is also “quintessentially postmodern” [sic].’ I suppose that the scattered structure is the postmodernism ...”

“... reliance on taste or memory’, as he would later explain to the poet Jackson Mac Low. His piece Williams Mix (1953), intricately spliced together from six hundred sections of pre-recorded electromagnetic tape, and his solo piano work, Music of Changes (1951), were assembled using instructions divined from the I Ching. But by the time an audience heard them ...”

“... accolades: ‘Dr Juliette Tuakli my beloved mum, Dr Lade Wosornu my brilliant father, Dr Wilburn Williams my dearest dad’. Three parents, and all of them doctors. If there isn’t a novel in that then there’s no justice – but it isn’t this one. The other end of the alphabetised list feeds into one element of the story that is told here: ‘and, above ...”

“... He returned to Beijing in 1974, and worked in a factory. He wrote furiously, even – like Charles Olson – on the walls of his room. He hated the city, ‘those small light-filled boxes, the crucibles in which age-old humanity is melted down.’ He thought of himself as an insect, ‘pinned to a board with its legs dancing’. But he fell in with a ...”

“... his home in Worcester. There, Fisher saw for the first time the work of the later William Carlos Williams, Basil Bunting, Robert Duncan, Allen Ginsberg, Louis Zukofsky, Robert Creeley, Charles Olson and others. ‘I’d never seen poetry used as these people were, in their various ways, using it,’ Fisher ...”

“... Langston (a middle name – he was baptised James, after his father). Mary’s next husband, Charles Henry Langston, was an abolitionist too; he insisted they name their son after Nat Turner, the leader of the 1831 Virginia slave revolt. His younger brother, John Langston, became one of the most prominent advocates for Black rights in the Reconstruction ...”

“... truth needing no further comment, at the head of his chapter on ‘Austerity’. The nostalgic Charles Ryder is remembering the warm depths of a great mahogany-framed cooper bathtub at Brideshead. A huge towel hangs from a chintz armchair and a brass lever – ‘heavy as a piece of marine engineering’ – stands where moden taps might be. With its coal ...”

“... Rotters’ Club.5 The last, and most famous, was the Inklings, with C.S. Lewis (‘Jack’) and Charles Williams, at Oxford in the 1930s. On this subject, Humphrey Carpenter’s 1978 study, The Inklings, last revised in 1997, is the place to start.Religion: Mabel, his widowed mother, was a Roman Catholic convert, and Tolkien at least believed that her ...”