“... different, but the unself-conscious way with which Zagajewski handles this ‘I’ brings to mind Frank O’Hara. Certainly, it wouldn’t be easy to say who is the more charming, and charm is very much the issue. The difference is that in O’Hara the ‘I’ (as in ‘I do this, I do that’) is the repository of all charm: the poems are, in Norman ...”

“... in ‘an extravagant, eye-catching green robe, bought for him, in Tunis she thought, by his Aunt Frank on his first transatlantic trip’. Elective affinity was everything. As Williams said of Pound: ‘It took just one look and I knew it was it.’ Their relationship had a note of comedy in it: ‘He was impressed with his own poetry,’ Williams ...”

“... did not draw on classical literature. Women could be ‘lovers of their own sex’ or, in the more frank Greek loan word, ‘tribades’ (literally ‘rubbers’; the words ‘rubster’ and ‘fricatrice’ were also used in the 17th century). The OED cites no usage of ‘lesbianism’ in the modern sense before 1870, when it was used to argue that ...”

“... but relations became strained last year when Moscow denounced its rapporteur, Britain’s Frank Judd, and refused to go on working with him. Judd’s successor, the Swiss Andreas Gross, was allowed into Chechnya in August in spite of criticising the lack of democracy in the elections Russia organised. Gross believes that the world has to work with the ...”

“... nursing, first from Russell, then from a long succession of others including W.E. Johnson, Frank Ramsey, Keynes, Moore, Sraffa, Norman Malcolm and finally, literally, from Dr Bevan and his family, who took him into their home and cared for him during his final illness. It is amazing to think of those ornaments of the golden age of the don, seemingly ...”

“... Marilyn Monroe fucked both Kennedy brothers before taking her own life, if she did indeed take it. Frank Sinatra raised money for the Reagans and acted as at least a confidante to the First Lady. Norman Podhoretz’s son-in-law Elliott Abrams, while working as Reagan’s Assistant Secretary of State, dunned the Sultan of Brunei for a $10 million backhander to ...”

“... tape over every offending apostrophe. My contradictory husband, who is sometimes known in his field as Write-it-Wrong Elbow, liberated a few of the apostrophes by pulling off the adhesive tape. 13 January. The canonisation of Dame Iris proceeds apace and the BBC are now preparing to show on Omnibus extracts from a video taken from an interview carried ...”

“... open it up. Fortunately, though, there is an opening in the wall and we look through to a huge field of barley. Marooned in it are six or eight sets of huge 17th-century gateposts in brick and stone, their summits crowned with urns, the posts themselves set with cartouches and carved ornaments, a wonderful sight and all that remains, according to a guide ...”

“... allowed more than three-quarters of all Zambians voted to get rid of Kaunda and that he remains a frank advocate of single-party rule. It turns out, by the by, that the whole election was an imperialist plot against the people of Zambia and that the only reasonable outcome would have been for President Kaunda to continue his rule for ever: we have this on the ...”

“... much matters: deterrence deterred and deterred both ways. It worked, for example, against plans by Frank Wisner of the CIA to commit paramilitary groups trained in West Germany to aid the Hungarian uprising in 1956 and it made the Russians generally cautious outside their own sphere. President Glafkos Cleridis of Cyprus has revealed that after the first ...”

“... the governors of the University, including the Bishop of Cork and the farmer he canvassed in his field whose only question was: ‘A professor of English? Can you talk Irish?’ He was overwhelmingly defeated for the job by Daniel Corkery, who had the same Republican credentials but a much more potent neo-Wagnerian ideology of race and nationality. When his ...”

“... engineers manqué and are regarded with suspicion by those who spend their lives in the lab or the field. That Crick has largely – though never entirely – escaped this suspicion is a tribute both to his undisputed brilliance and to his success in choosing a series of superb experimentalists with whom to work. As he and Watson pointed out in their famous ...”

“... arrivals in Bloomsbury from the outside. ‘Most people were at that time ordinary,’ said Frank Swinnerton, looking back with nostalgia to the beginning of the century, and Dora Carrington might have had the good luck to stay ordinary. David Garnett, introducing his selection of letters, felt that the reader might ask: ‘Who was this woman ...”

“... entails a deliberate splitting of art from political events: an ‘irrationalist fatalism’, as Frank Lentricchia would have it; or, for Terry Eagleton, a covert polemic against Marxism. And scholars whose entire orientation proceeds from Heidegger’s or de Man’s writing are forced to explain how a person can be both theoretically compelling and ...”

“... had to be kept apart for 200 pages by misunderstandings, misadventures and backchat. Boon had to field objections not only from the tyrannous ‘Biddy’ Johnson of Woman’s Weekly and the stern male law-givers of Dundee, but from Mrs Mary Bonnycastle, of Harlequin Books in Winnipeg, to whom he supplied doctor-nurse novels in an endless stream and who was ...”