“... She began her address – ‘A Naturalist View of Persons’ – by saying: ‘According to John Knox, in his First Blast of the Trumpet against the Monstrous Regiment of Women, it is “repugnant to nature”, as well as “contumely to God, and the subversion of good order”, to promote a woman to any position of superiority in any realm. We in the ...”

“... to place and pin them down in a way that could not be done with real American poets – Carlos Williams, Wallace Stevens, John Ashbery. She even places Lowell inside a critical trope. ‘The New Critical doctrine that every poem is a little drama built around a central paradox is ... in the very fabric of their lives ...”

“... of grandiose theory. The new book’s jacket image, a striking black and white photo by John Sadovy, shows a young man almost literally biting the dust. Only after turning the book over to look at the back does one notice his presumed killer, reloading his rifle. This example already poses questions beyond the ken of liberal orthodoxy. The dead ...”

“... writers such as Wyndham Lewis, E.E. Cummings, Ford Madox Ford, Louis Zukofsky and William Carlos Williams, but also to various editors and patrons: to the somewhat mysterious Margaret Cravens, a Paris-based piano student from Madison, Indiana, who in 1910 bestowed on Pound an annual stipend so he could concentrate on his poetry, only to commit suicide two ...”

“... a dozen Stevens texts pre-dating the Pisan Cantos and Paterson, while excluding Pound and Williams, the book seems more atavistic than Contemporary, and slanted into bias. Nothing in the objectivist or projective line is included. Olson is rejected, along with Dorn. A tradition of strong poetry, leading back through Stevens to Coleridge, Keats and ...”

“... he trumpeted. ‘He is merely the first. It is the restart of civilisation.’ William Carlos Williams, working fairly happily as a doctor in New Jersey, was to be Pound’s second escapee. Marianne Moore might be his third. At one stage, he envisaged annual liberations – assuming, of course, that a sufficient supply of stifled talent was available. The ...”

“... critics. Happily, such praise was soon forthcoming – the Fugitives included future eminents like John Crowe Ransom and Robert Penn Warren in addition to the usual line-up of duffers – and the group’s magazine, the Fugitive, was widely welcomed as the voice of a significant new literary movement. This was a period when every new movement was deemed to be ...”

“... In​ The Country and the City, Raymond Williams described the powerful attraction many people feel for the ‘knowable community’ of the rural past. We hope to find in such places, he wrote, a prelapsarian refuge from the world of today. One such refuge could be found in the novels of George Eliot, which are populated by cottagers, carpenters, farmers’ wives, lacklustre clergymen and Methodist preachers ...”

“... Virtue – the virtue in question being industriousness. A ‘critical biography’ by Merryn Williams came out in 1986, confounding Oliphant’s prediction. Elisabeth Jay’s edition substantially alters our sense of the Autobiography and its author. The earlier version was assembled by members of Oliphant’s family from ‘autobiographical bits’. Jay ...”

“... rentier C.H.B. Kitchen, some of whose books – Olive E, The Auction Sale and A Short Walk in Williams Park, for example – certainly deserve a reprint, Hartley in his last days went rapidly downhill, in life as in art. Our vogue for honesty in such matters, an honesty we now take wholly for granted, means that Wright as critic assumes that Hartley would ...”

“... covers the same period as this new collection; but there was plenty of work for the new editor, John Evans. The diaries were begun when Britten was 15 and ended, rather abruptly, when he was 25. They were written in pocket diaries, the earlier entries mostly fitting into the space allowed by the format, four days per page. As his interests widened Britten ...”

“... King’s College, London. His first book, a history of the Coldstream Guards written jointly with John Sparrow, was published in 1951. And there you have Michael Howard. Though he has grown in fame and distinction, and moved in governing circles on both sides of the Atlantic, and held four chairs including the Regius Professorship of Modern History at Oxford ...”

“... villages. In The Pilgrimage, first published in 1961 and recently reissued by McNally Editions, John Broderick writes that ‘the city dweller who passes through a country town and imagines it as sleepy and apathetic is very far from the truth: it is as watchful as the jungle.’ Broderick was born in Athlone in 1924. The Irish Midlands has few spectacular ...”

“... great credit to the publishers. This particular essay has provoked in another attentive reader, John Lucas (LRB, Vol. 5, No 20), the reflection that ‘language cannot be innocent.’ But surely it needs to be remarked that whereas indeed the British English that Hill and Lucas share cannot be in this sense ‘innocent’, that doesn’t necessarily hold ...”

“... Alexie’s characters know more about basketball and Hollywood, heavy metal and Hank Williams, than they do about buffalo. His young men might believe that they’re supposed to be warriors, but most of them know that’s a hopeless fantasy. Instead they are unemployed, or in prison, or alcoholic, or driving a truck. Alexie’s first novel and ...”