“... 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 ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... make you expect me to progress in a straight line … The latest salutation, by the way, is from Wallace Stevens who sent the Partisan Review a letter … saying that my review of The Man with the Blue Guitar was the ‘most invigorating review’ that he had ever had.At other times, his arrogance wasn’t tempered by self-consciousness. He wrote to Pound ...”

“... Partisan Review, the Kenyon Review and Sewanee Review, with a good deal of auto-canonising. Robert Lowell, almost by default it seemed, was ceded pride of place, the ‘most important American poet now at work’. Lowell and Randall Jarrell, roommates at Kenyon College in the 1930s, and to a lesser extent Berryman too, were big on rating and ...”

“... poems, hung around in one’s mind ‘long after one has put the book down in favour of Wallace Stevens’. And then there was her interest in pets: ‘She has also written a book about cats, which as far as I am concerned casts a shadow over even the most illustrious name.’ Although the unillustrious poet privately acknowledged her debt to the ...”

“... court infamy with his scabrous biographies of Elvis Presley and John Lennon), the theatre critic Robert Brustein, and others – that helped crack open the shell that released Alex Portnoy into the urban wild. The glum littérateur acquired the gleam of an asylum escapee. Pranked at a breakfast shop by Roth, who mimicked the voice of Goldman’s mother ...”

“... an instructor in the English department at Yale. Pearson was a correspondent of Ezra Pound and Wallace Stevens as well as F.O. Matthiessen, the Harvard scholar and cousin of his pupil, who had taken his own life earlier in 1950 under a cloud of threats over his leftist leanings and homosexuality. Pearson was in these years at work on a study of Nathaniel ...”

“... arrogance, warning of the Zionist lobby’s influence over Washington in an interview with Mike Wallace on 60 Minutes. After the revolution, Ayatollah Khomeini embraced the Palestinian cause with a fervour unmatched elsewhere in the Arab world, hoping to transcend his country’s Persian and Shia identities, and to win support from the people of the region ...”

“... Kavanagh’s generosity also extends too obviously to her more helpful and positive informants. Wallace Potts, an ex, a pioneering gay pornographer and archivist for the Nureyev Foundation in Bath, on whose initiative the biography was commissioned, is depicted as saintly, which perhaps he was. Another ex, ...”

“... Even ‘To Autumn’ may give pause to a reader. Most mainline criticism tends to accept Robert Bridges’s estimate of this Ode as perhaps the poet’s most perfect work. Among more recent critics, Bernard Blackstone and Harold Bloom have stressed its absolute superiority to the other Odes. Certainly ‘To Autumn’ is flawless, one of the poems in ...”

“... writer, all of it as a private, and outlived nearly all his contemporaries, with the exception of Robert Graves, born in the same year, 1895. The postwar life has its doldrums, and for a biographer the narrative sails are hard to hoist. For his full-dress Life, three decades in the making, Dilworth adopts a chronicle approach, breaking his close-grained ...”

“... the history of the Civil War right – whatever that might mean – or by tearing down statues of Robert E. Lee across the South. The 2400 miles of Route 66, America’s most famous highway, pass through only one state in the former Confederacy, Texas. Yet in 1936 the first edition of the Negro Motorist Green Book identified half of the 89 counties along the ...”