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“... bat’ and ‘First Love’. He liked best the addictive serials of the Thirties written by Frank Richards for the Magnet and the Gem, with the characters neatly divided into two gangs easily distinguished by their appearance. There were curly-haired, pretty-mouthed cricketers, Bob Cherry and Tom Merry (Simon Raven’s favourite), and the ...”

“... different from what we customarily get under the heading of ‘spatial form’, a term that Joseph Frank coined many years ago in connection with the novel (Frank, incidentally, doesn’t appear in Moretti’s text or bibliography). Frank’s coining was essentially a Modernist ...”

“... was renewed in 1960 with a programme of long-distance observation conducted by the astronomer Frank Drake. He called it Project Ozma, after the rightful ruler of Oz in the Frank L. Baum stories, and pointed a National Radio Astronomy Observatory telescope at the stars Epsilon Eridani and Tau Ceti, which are similar ...”

“... Rebecca is Fine Blend NV. Are the coffee people setting up against the sugar people who own the James Bond copyright?) He has benefited from astute merchandising, especially in the US. It was an American publisher who first made him big, and like Higgins (and unlike the more chauvinistic Forsyth), Follett affiliates himself primarily to his transatlantic ...”

“... James Joyce​ resented the Second World War for distracting readers from the newly published Finnegans Wake, and what with one thing and another I’ve sometimes felt the same way, on behalf of Mark Frost and David Lynch, about the news environment that accompanied the broadcast of Twin Peaks: The Return. I say ‘on behalf of’ because I imagine that Lynch couldn’t care less ...”

“... Wollheim, and no fewer than 13 of Spender’s own poems, read by Harold Pinter, Ted Hughes, James Fenton, Jill Balcon and Barry Humphries. (At Larkin’s, there were three.) Spender’s order of service, despite his obvious absence, seems to acknowledge both his customary admiration for the truly great and his anxiety about not being great himself. And ...”

“... New Zealand, all national dots. Not all poets love places. And not many poets love cities the way Frank O’Hara loved New York. Crawford, like his nearest literary forebear Norman MacCaig, loves places both rural and urban: in his work, he can throw his voice ‘deep down the larynx of Glen Esk’, and he can marry Iona, or bring the reader into close ...”

“... as the quantity of this commentary is the diversity of critical approach. Trollope would seem, in Frank Kermode’s phrase, a ‘patient’ author, capable of absorbing all new lines of analysis. As well as orthodox readings of a literary-critical or literary-historical kind which the subject could himself have read without perplexity (for example, those by ...”

“... in a mental asylum in Ithaca, New York; and Max Ferber, a fictional character based on the painter Frank Auerbach, who left his parents behind in Germany in 1939, when he escaped for England.When The Emigrants appeared in Michael Hulse’s English translation, in 1996, it was often described as a book about four victims of the Holocaust, which it was not ...”

“... afford a therapist, a $4.95 paperback helps fill the gap. Think of Kathy Bates in Misery, breaking James Caan’s ankles, tying him to a desk, forcing him to resurrect in one novel the character he had killed in another; think of the suicide attempts of teenage girls when Robbie left Take That. Bates is crazy but recognisable, the fan turned fanatic, whose ...”

“... to the exploration of black in the work of many African American painters, including Kerry James Marshall and Glenn Ligon.) The centre of Painting (11.30.92), an enormous mixed media work on linen, is almost entirely white, except for a thick smear of coral. Around the edges of the canvas, brushstrokes in black, red and blue suggest forms, perhaps ...”

“... culture disdained the old canons of success. Sandage counts 12 pop hits celebrating losers, from Frank Sinatra (‘Here’s to the Losers’) to the Beatles (‘I’m a Loser’) and Judy Collins (‘Hard Loving Loser’). And all before Bob Dylan’s long line of angry ballads indicting the very idea of ambition itself. An entire generation sniggered as ...”

“... with its dialectical wiles, will find the worm of ideology at work in every apple; it is, as Frank O’Hara wrote in his poem ‘The Critic’, the assassin of orchards. But here are two books, both theoretically acute and both marvels of close reading, that argue the case from apparently different sides of the ideological fence, yet which permanently ...”

“... Crivelli, director of the Laboratorio Joyce, has placed all the relevant Joycean locations in James Joyce: Triestine Itineraries. And now John McCourt, founder and director of the annual Trieste Joyce School has published a study of Joyce’s life and work in that first decade of exile, with a brief coda covering his return after the end of the war. The ...”

“... That the English have been slow to recognise James Merrill as the best poet in the language after Elizabeth Bishop has long seemed strange to Americans. Come to think of it, British recognition of Bishop herself was belated; for decades she was upstaged by Robert Lowell, probably because he lived in England and behaved in a way that seemed more certifiably poetic ...”