“... for herself:I decide to sit out on my balcony and read a little of The Grace of Great Things by Robert Grudin which sounded good when I read the book jacket in the store but it turns out to be too academic and deep and not exactly beach reading so I put it down after a half hour and pick up Black Betty by Walter Mosley which I’ve been meaning to read ...”

“... make an uncertain comment when the surrounding water shines. The birds evoked in her elegy for Robert Lowell, ‘North Haven’, have no trouble performing their elegiac function: The Goldfinches are back, or others like them, and the White-throated Sparrow’s five-note song, pleading and pleading, brings tears to the eyes. More distracting is the ...”

“... US government position’ was ‘We are in Berlin by right of conquest.’ As late as 1966, Robert McNamara briefed the president that one of the objectives of US military forces in Europe was to discourage ‘the revival of German militarism’. Douglas Lute, the US ambassador to Nato under Obama, was even more explicit. The alliance ‘fundamentally ...”

“... homosexual rape carried out by an older man – specifically, a domineering uncle-guardian named Robert Manning, whose bed and board were shared by the fledgling author before he left for Bowdoin College. (Manning also happened to be, for those who might want to make something of it, the most renowned pomologist in the United States.) For ...”

“... path to early success, particularly her mentor, Ted Morrison, who got her invited to dinner with Robert Frost (Rich charmed him) and who groomed her for the Yale Younger Poets competition judged by Auden, which she won in 1950. The prize put her on the map. A Change of World, published the following year, garnered respectful reviews; she shone at public ...”

“... and nursery décor and its tendency to metonymise and otherwise play the figures of speech. Like Wallace Stevens, whom she much admired, she made jokes, and even more than in Stevens’s case, the jokes were sly, hardly perceptible, there for her own pleasure. Yet for all the ironies, visible and invisible, some of the poems even have a moral.She graduated ...”

“... freedom struggle. The four political assassinations that define the 1960s – those of John and Robert Kennedy, Malcolm X and King – stand in for the very large numbers (almost all black and lost to national public memory) martyred to racial justice. It is now a commonplace that, instead of protecting Southern civil rights workers, the FBI (with the ...”

“... a return to the historic quartier as the basis of urban planning in Europe; on the other side were Robert Venturi, Denise Scott Brown and Steven Izenour, who embraced the commercial strip (‘billboards are almost all right,’ they proclaimed in 1972 in Learning from Las Vegas, a manifesto to which Delirious New York is an indirect riposte). Koolhaas could ...”

“... LSD to twenty inmates of the Atlanta Federal Penitentiary nearly every day for 15 months. Robert Hyde at the Boston Psychopathic Hospital paid hundreds of students from Emerson, Harvard and MIT $15 each to drink a vial of liquid that might induce an ‘altered state’; in the aftermath, one of the subjects hanged herself in a clinic bathroom. As well ...”

“... he turned from criticising capitalism to criticising the people who had rallied around Henry Wallace. Westbrook is made uncomfortable by this turn, but since I think that what has been called ‘the romance of American Communism’ was a disaster for the American Left, and that the Cold War was a good war, I am inclined to shrug off Westbrook’s claim ...”

“... is now. Photographs were key, and Acker photographed brilliantly, especially in the shots taken by Robert Mapplethorpe: that soft, white face, with big, round eyes in the cheeks of a chubby cherub; that soft, white skin, pierced and pinched and hyperextended with hooks and rings and belts and dumb-bells: Acker was lifting weights long before lifting weights ...”

“... Well, I could never write a verse, ­– could you?Let’s to the Prado and make the most of time.Robert Browning, ‘How It Strikes a Contemporary’The world has an established place for poems about paintings – sometimes you wonder if there was ever a poet who didn’t write one – but, oddly, the poem-painting relationship doesn’t seem to be reversible ...”

“... a slave-driver’s lash. Scots, in that sense, were the non-commissioned officers of empire; even Robert Burns, a sentimental abolitionist, planned to take a job in Jamaica as an overseer of slaves. The same myth suggested that Gaelic emigrants raised in a clan system had a special rapport with traditional societies. In fact, Highlanders behaved with ...”

“... living with his wife, Hetta, at Studio House, Hampstead Hill Gardens – in a set-up described by Robert Lowell as a ‘household [that] had a weird, sordid nobility that made other Englishmen seem like a veneer’. Empson’s idea of making lunch was to place an assortment of unpunctured cans of Chinese vegetables on the gas cooker, where they tended to ...”

“... European underpinnings. His intelligence was at once sceptical and abstractly poetic, closer to Wallace Stevens (‘Poetry is not personal’) than to Walt Whitman, with whom he has so often been paired (sometimes by himself). ‘I guess I’m deeply in love with America, really,’ Evans said later in his life. And then, by way of ...”