“... change your lifestyle, break bonds and escape binds. Jack finds it odd that his father should be reading about changes in direction so close to the end of the road. Happenstance is rather good at showing how no time of life is free from its worries. It might have been constructed to supply case-studies of the crises in which self-help books deal. The ...”

“... is as if we are enabled to dream by taking as our own the notation of someone else’s dream.’ Reading this Tiepolo is like watching a movie with someone who is more interested in the work of the director and the cinematographer than in the original story. (The analogy works in another way: Tiepolo was a painter-director, supervising the work of others and ...”

“... forced to become like the Democratic Party in America or never be in power again.’ On this reading, the trouble with Woodrow, the former Gaitskellite whose own career had become a Smilesian parable, was that he was New Labour before his time, forced to support a Conservative Government that had been induced to betray its conservative heritage through ...”

“... exercised over me little of the magic it has for so many others, including Kavenna and Peter Davidson. ‘The Idea of North’ was the Canadian pianist Glenn Gould’s phrase and the title of a radio documentary he made. ‘I have an enormous compulsion to look upon the polar seas,’ he wrote to a friend in 1965, ‘and I find that this is growing ...”

“... for a surrogate mother in every relationship,’ says Elizabeth Sweeting). His ‘marriage’ to Peter Pears, begun shortly after Mrs Britten’s death, may be partly understood in this light (Pears’s singing voice, it was noted, was uncannily similar to Mrs Britten’s), as may his lifelong willingness to be looked after, sometimes dominated, by a series ...”

“... doubtless has roots deeper than I care to explore, but my late father used to make a point of reading Jeremy Taylor’s ‘Holy Dying’ to alleviate the Christmas ordeal and his father was orphaned as a baby. Chance put Geoffrey Gorer’s pioneer study of Death, Grief and Mourning (1965), dust-jacketed in tasteful purple, into my hands for a review. An ...”

“... His analytic method is familiar to literary critics going about their normal secular business. In reading any narrative we have to supply material missing from the text, usually to construct character or motive. The gospels are terse in style and leave more than most stories to the imagination of the reader. Their gaps and discrepancies are not, as was once ...”

“... video of him reciting his most famous poem has had just 585 hits; only 107 people have heard his reading of ‘Strambotti’. Prince’s publishing career began early, and in the brightest manner possible. Eliot accepted a number of his early poems for publication in the Criterion, and Prince was only 26 when Faber issued his first collection (austerely ...”

“... in telling the story of the growth of his own mind, and this story takes the form of a romance of reading. By his own account, Bloom is an obsessive reader, with a ‘preternatural memory’ for poems. The risk of such critical virtues, naturally, is that they can poison intuitive powers of response. The pleasures of early ...”

“... tribes of an expanding American subculture, and gave them a name and a voice. The first reading took place at the Six Gallery in San Francisco on 7 October 1955. Michael McClure who also read that night along with Gary Snyder, Philip Whalen and Philip Lamantia, describes the poem’s impact in Scratching the Beat Surface (1982): I hadn’t seen ...”

“... he only really sputtered to life again in 1990 with an autobiography, and died a few years later. Peter Orlovsky and Allen Ginsberg at the Hotel de Londres, Paris in 1957. Bob Thompson, ‘LeRoi Jones and his Family’ (1964) Brion Gysin, ‘Calligraphy’ (1960) Brion Gysin, William S. Burroughs, Untitled (Primrose Path, the Third Mind, p.12, 1965) Ettore ...”

“... qualities, but also Kant’s more formidable ones. Beer suggests that Carlyle’s ‘balked reading’ of Kant made the latter ‘a vigorous figure within Carlyle’s intellectual dramas’. It is an interesting idea, but Beer is content merely to raise it. The problem is that she is anxious not to write crudely about the intellectual or artistic ...”

“... poems on each of: natural magic, cats, railways, married life, childhood, and the Victorian age. Reading the many historical poems in this book – they make up as much as one-third, and are among the best – it struck me that they all had something medieval about them. Which I interpret as meaning that the incontrovertible realia of the past are always ...”

“... possible to write poems.’ Richler includes some grimly beautiful counter-examples, among them Peter Porter’s ‘Annotations of Auschwitz’, a poem which incorporates Adorno’s point:                     Such death, says the painter, is worthwhile – it makes a colour never known. It makes a sight that’s unimagined, says the ...”

“... Dryasdust has had his day and good riddance. Don’t be deceived by the slick subtitles, however. Peter Lake knows more than anyone else about the religious culture of the secondary and tertiary stages of the English Reformation. This is not only a book of dazzling brilliance and acute intelligence, it has many important things to say about the ...”