“... to his anthology The New Poetry, which promoted Hughes and Plath over the stodgy Movement), Edward Lucie-Smith and, terrifyingly, Michael Horovitz, the editor of ‘one of the decade’s genuinely polemical anthologies: Children of Albion (1969)’. Stevenson’s fondness for Prynne over Larkin is less offensive than his reasons for dismissing ...”

“... close like that, as though slipping out of poetry and back into the life that preceded it. Henry James​, who was fascinated by Browning, spoke in an obituary piece about ‘the bristling surface of his actuality’: stylistically, the poetry is full of bristles, musically rough and jagged, full of dashes and exclamation marks, syntactically ...”

“... convenience. Its methodology is lies. An atmospheric scientist once told me that he had checked Edward Teller’s projections of the amount of fallout that would reach Americans during the years of above-ground nuclear testing in southern Nevada. The great genius had somehow left off some zeros, reducing the impact a hundred or a thousandfold, while other ...”

“... David Rudkin and the director Alan Clarke in which a repressed Midlands schoolboy’s visions of Edward Elgar and King Penda threaten to unlock the secrets of his own sexuality. All of these productions are considered at length in The Magic Box, Rob Young’s hefty survey of occult British film and television. Young, who wrote the excellent Electric Eden ...”

“... of secrets, whispers, unanswered telephones, Anne Frank’s house, Albert Schweitzer’s music, Edward Lear as ‘dream companion’. These are the kind of poems a good poet would write if his ‘one idea’ for the moment were that everything in the world wants to be a message. Rain in London wants to ‘whisper’. A shaken duster waves ...”

“... really is in Texas.) He is a singular artist, at once folk, Conceptual and Pop, an unlikely son of Edward Hopper, Marcel Duchamp and James Dean. Two retrospectives – a small show of photographs, a large one of drawings – are at the Whitney Museum until 26 September (the drawings will travel to Washington and LA over the ...”

“... criticism in five words or fewer: on her third quarto of Othello, ‘a sad one’; on her copy of James Shirley’s The Constant Maid, or Love Will Find Out the Way, ‘I doe not lik this.’ Across the start of Eastward Hoe, the very funny city comedy by George Chapman, Ben Jonson and John Marston, she wrote ‘prity one’, then crossed it ...”

“... Edwardian imperialism. I thought very little about him until around ten years ago, when my friend James Fenton, the poet, said that on a trip to South Korea he had been approached by a Korean professor who asked him if it was true that ‘ck’ in the name ‘Cockburn’ was not pronounced. When James asked him why he was ...”

“... a different matter. ‘Above Tooey Mountain’, for example, interweaves letters from Hopkins, James Joyce’s mother and Sir James Melville with the poet’s own experience of motherhood: the pay-off is too much like an Ian Hamilton poem (arms damp with flowers ‘from holding them so long’), but the narrative leaps ...”

“... does, somewhere between literary respectability and bestsellerdom: John O’Hara, Nelson Algren, James Jones, John Hersey. Parini declares in a fighting Afterword that answers to the Steinbeck question ‘spring to mind’. Clearly the answer which springs highest and most persistently is intellectual snobbery. Steinbeck’s low status is ascribed to the ...”

“... on to his young half-sister. For the most part, however, she was left to her own devices. Henry James’s story ‘The Pupil’ was partly based on the unsettled childhood of his friend John Singer Sargent, but he might as well have been describing Violet Paget’s youth. It was Mrs Sargent, encountered when Violet was ten, who became the first of a series ...”

“... the notion of The Tempest as the farewell of a magus to his art has been a commonplace ever since Edward Dowden published Shakspere (1877), the sequel to his equally influential William Shakespeare: A Critical Study of His Mind and Art (1875). Dowden divided the playwright’s career into four stages, devising a schema according to which Shakespeare learned ...”

“... from Nell Gwyn to Louise de Kérouaille. She was kind to Charles’s first illegitimate son, James Crofts, duke of Monmouth – just 13 in 1662 – and would later plead (unsuccessfully) for his life after he tried to topple his Catholic uncle, James II, in 1685. Catherine found allies in women like herself: the young ...”

“... In December 1501 the Scottish poet William Dunbar received £5 from the Court of King James IV, a payment which was given to him, according to the Treasurer’s accounts, ‘eftir he com furth of Ingland’. It is not known for sure what he had been doing there. He may well have been in the entourage of the Scottish embassy which was conducting the negotiations with Henry VII that led to the marriage two years later of Princess Margaret Tudor to James IV ...”

“... Bawne. In The Tree of Hands the successful novelist Benet lives by herself with her infant son James, having refused to marry, or to live with, his father Edward. When her mad mother, Mopsa, comes to stay with her, James is taken ill and dies in hospital. Mopsa then kidnaps ...”