“... loves America and its poetry but does not live there. At one point Davie defends Pound’s poem Hugh Selwyn Mauberley, and his own arguments about it, against an adverse critic. ‘For this sort of Englishman, “externality” – to things English – is what any American is condemned to; and per contra “inwardness” – with things English – is what ...”

“... add a little of the ‘I can’t go on, I go on’ of Beckett and a lot of the run-on ranting of Thomas Bernhard, a contemporary whom the Gaddis surrogate here accuses of plagiarism before the fact. (Agapē Agape does recall Concrete, a Bernhard novel about a writer unable to begin a biography of a composer.) In the end, as the dying man works to get his ...”

“... be in with a chance in the ‘Best Modernist Title’ category. The parallax effect is defined by Thomas Browne in the poem’s epigraph: ‘Many things are known as some are seen, that is by Paralaxis, or at some distance from their true and proper being.’ As an optical metaphor, ‘paralaxis’ has huge potential for the poet interested in the ...”

“... Swynford, the children of all three unions – as well as Katherine’s by her first husband, Sir Hugh Swynford – became one large blended family. Chaucer’s wife, Philippa, was Katherine’s sister, and so their children became part of this ménage. Thomas, his eldest son, was born around the same time as Henry ...”

“... The play concludes with the future Elizabeth I’s christening, during which her godfather, Thomas Cranmer, the archbishop of Canterbury, is inspired to prophesy:In her days every man shall eat in safety,Under his own vine, what he plants; and singThe merry songs of peace to all his neighbours:God shall be truly known; and those about herFrom her shall ...”

“... 1861; the New Testament in Efik (spoken in Calabar, West Africa), translated from the Greek by Hugh Goldie (1815-95), Edinburgh, 1862; Saint Luke in Dinka (spoken on the White Nile), translated by the Roman Catholic Central African Mission, Brixen, 1866, a rare instance of a Catholic translation in a profession dominated by Protestants; Ruth and Jonah in ...”

“... me from being a “bard” at all.’ He was cheerily scornful of the poetry of the top bard, Hugh MacDiarmid, which he considered to be made out of ‘Plastic Scots’. MacDiarmid, meanwhile, ticked off Graham for allowing ‘non-Scottish’ influences to shape his work, so that it failed to address ‘the crucial needs and possibilities of our ...”

“... of language and of the racially, religiously and sexually oppressed: the neglect, perhaps, of what Hugh Ormsby-Lennon refers to in the book as ‘a social solidarity semantic’. The broad concentration upon a generally-neglected period of language history (the 17th and 18th centuries) is wholly welcome, as is the attention paid to lexicology and ...”

“... bright with insiderism as he treks around Fitzrovia with Tambimuttu, Julian Maclaren-Ross, Dylan Thomas and the gang. ‘Senses were heightened, perceptions changed, new visions possible,’ he burbles, but even he finds it hard to convince himself that this heady atmosphere produced much in the way of even half-decent poetry and prose. Sinclair’s critical ...”

“... dialect than my own’. Even the Ossian controversy, which embroiled Ferguson in argument with Thomas Percy, only highlights his lack of any serious nationalist convictions. He confided to Hugh Blair that the poems of Ossian appeared to him as ‘matter of some curiosity in the history of mankind, but very little as ...”

“... are the absent fathers. Poor Agnes Bowker of Market Harborough, deserted by Randall Dowley and Hugh Brady, blamed a monster for her pregnancy in 1569 and claimed to have given birth to a cat. The champion cad was Francis Lane, who in 1608 promised to marry Rose Arnold, got her pregnant, tried to push her down a well and claimed another man was the ...”

“... defines as the effect of the quotation-marks in Pound’s Homage to Sextus Propertius and Hugh Selwyn Mauberley: ‘the effect is not that of avoiding the rap but rather of recording the rapping noise made by those things which the world throws at us in the form of prejudice and opinion ...’ (The playing around with the idiom, ‘taking the ...”

“... cantata, suffers by comparison with Britten’s Spring Symphony, which set some of the same Thomas Nashe poetry a decade and a half later; and while the comparison may be unfair, it is revealing. Britten’s genius lay in the precise capture of verbal imagery and sonority in striking musical ideas. Sequence and balance mattered more to him than ...”

“... problems. Parsifal’s sexual-pathological element, which so impressed and disturbed Thomas Mann (an authority on such matters), is one of the Parsifal problems; the issue of whether or not the work is ‘Christian’ is another. Nietzsche isolated these two problems together with a third, which is more peculiarly German: like Hanslick, Nietzsche ...”

“... pedigree. A month after Huxley’s arrival in 1937, P.G. Wodehouse left, but J.B. Priestley, Hugh Walpole and Anthony Powell were all hawking their wares with varying degrees of success (Powell was hindered by the fact that his agent had dropped dead on Hollywood Boulevard a few days before his visit). Unlike Huxley, these other English writers found Los ...”