“... ever on $1.67-a-gallon petroleum, out here in a terrain just a little less harsh than Afghanistan. Thomas Jefferson was afraid of the red lands, afraid that where the arable soil ended so would his arcadian yeoman ideal, and that Europeans would revert to nomadism. There’s something roving and ferocious about the Euroamerican West that suggests he’s ...”

“... promotional freebie, and composed of three short, pictorial essays about three dope-fiend authors, Thomas de Quincey, Marcel Schwob and John Keats. The essays are clearly the product of much reading – Jaeggy has translated Schwob’s Vies imaginaires and De Quincey’s Last Days of Immanuel Kant into Italian – though it’s the reading not of a scholar but ...”

“... of Bowie’s musical heroes of the 1960s – John Lennon, Syd Barrett, Anthony Newley, Bob Dylan, the Velvet Underground. Which would make Ziggy Stardust the beautiful butterfly that emerged from the chrysalis. Paul Trynka begins his biography with a description of Bowie’s performance of ‘Starman’ on Top of the Pops on 5 July 1972. It was three ...”

“... with either the metaphysical disjunctions of post-Eliot Modernists or the cascading syllables of Dylan Thomas’s New Romanticism, but Movement writers such as Larkin were allergic to the whiff of self-importance they detected in poets at ease on public platforms. When Day-Lewis’s final Collected Poems was published in 1954, it met with a muted ...”

“... other men,’ she told Barrow. Something of that state of mind was harshly illuminated by Caitlin Thomas, adopted daughter of Augustus John and wife of Dylan, in her autobiography, Leftover Life to Kill. She was no Mimi. As promiscuous, drunk and inclined to throw furniture as her husband, she was nevertheless unable to ...”

“... Ana da Silva, who was 27 when they formed, had a doctorate and had written a thesis on Bob Dylan. It also contained excited teenagers. Mark Stewart was a 6’7’’ white boy from Bristol who loved black music. In 1978, aged 17, he and four others formed the Pop Group. The conceptual cockiness of their name hinted at the scale of their ambitions. They ...”

“... a crass promotion for the Armani empire? (‘Life is promotion,’ the Guggenheim’s director, Thomas Krens, has cheerfully noted.) Arranged by colour and genre rather than chronologically, the four hundred garments cover the phases and influences of Armani’s career over the past twenty-five years, emphasising androgyny, minimalism, cinema, sensuality ...”

“... campaign book, written in collaboration with a pair of Washington speechwriters, Vinca LaFleur and Dylan Loewe (‘You made this process a joy,’ Harris tells them in the acknowledgments). It makes for dreary reading (‘This is where I learned that “faith” is a verb,’ Harris writes about attending church as a child and hearing Christ’s injunctions to ...”

“... Duchamp, William Burroughs, Frank O’Hara, Hugo Ball, Geoff Dyer, Kafka, Samuel Beckett, Bob Dylan, Bruce Springsteen, Muhammad Ali, Joe Louis.Lamb deserves​ much better than this. He deserves, most of all, an account that makes you want to read him. His prose only intermittently wears Thomas Browne and Robert Burton ...”

“... roots, If only etymological ones. The word-play shows how far this Welsh poet lies from R.S. Thomas, if not from Dylan. There is no solemn stuff about belonging, no smack of loam or pit-dirt. If the use of language as subject-matter recalls Heaney in Wintering Out, the jokey juxtaposition of national matters and erotic ...”

“... and religious environments, and were conceived as both summations of and short cuts to learning. Thomas of Ireland’s Manipulus Florum (‘Handful of Flowers’) was compiled in Paris around 1306. It lists quotations under topical headings such as ‘superbia’ (pride) and ‘perseverantia’ (perseverance). Thomas’s ...”

“... you would like to outlive your reign. I often thought of both parts of Henry IV and Henry V, or of Thomas Cromwell as portrayed by Hilary Mantel. Hadrian is clear without overexplaining, honest without being ingratiating. Mavis Gallant said that the novel’s sentences in English were overcomplicated compared with the French, but I’m not sure I agree: in the ...”

“... The Queen smiled back at the unsmiling Sir Kevin. ‘Norman is so cheeky. Now we’ve read Dylan Thomas, haven’t we, and some John Cowper Powys. And Jan Morris we’ve read. But who else is there?’ ‘You could try Kilvert, maam,’ said Norman. ‘Who’s he?’ ‘A vicar, maam. Nineteenth century. Lived on the Welsh borders and wrote a ...”

“... Famine.In a lecture delivered on Irish radio in 1995 and published in The Great Irish Famine: The Thomas Davis Lecture Series, James Donnelly remarked thatthroughout the rest of the Famine years, the Gregory clause or ‘Gregoryism’ became a byword for the worst miseries of the disaster – eviction, exile, disease and death. When in 1874 Canon John ...”

“... Tibbald or Tibbles, inherited a name that just happened to be as innocently embarrassing as, say, Thomas Kitten. The name Theobald/Tibbald was there; Pope didn’t put it there. What is difficult about Pope is not his fantasy but his facts. The poet might have told Mack that no ‘translation’ had taken place, that not he but Nature had made ...”