“... original publisher withdrew, and the judges quit in protest over his treatment. One of them was Robert Lowell, whom Seidel had interviewed for the Paris Review the previous year. Final Solutions, which was eventually published by Random House, is laboriously indebted to Lowell, though the poems often resemble what Randall Jarrell described as the ...”

“... and set off, to leave without a trace, at noon, to vanish like fainting maidens. And burdocks, green armies of burdocks, and below, under the canvas of a Venetian café, the snails converse about eternity. What I might call the ‘variorum infinitive’ continues throughout the poem, to its very last half-line, the finite-infinite: ‘It is ...”

“... Beg’ and ‘A Postcard from North Antrim’, Heaney sounds that ‘heartbreak’ note which Robert Lowell used to talk about. Maybe Lowell talked to him about it. Field Work has an elegy in memory of Lowell (‘the master elegist’), and the two poets saw each other often during the mid-Seventies. In this book, even the ‘love-poems’ (a genre Heaney ...”

“... that she gave up her plans to work at the Oxford Mission among the factory girls of Bethnal Green. Her mother’s disapproval of her choice of an architect of uncertain social origins and a German name perhaps strengthened her resolve. (Lady Edith soon became close to her son-in-law, who designed her a wonderful house, Homewood, on the Knebworth ...”

“... Though the Company was set up as a rival to the Whig Bank of England and her political enemy Sir Robert Harley initially supported it, Sarah did not let this put her off. But as shares rose dramatically, she began to believe that the bubble would burst and dumped her own shares, persuading Marlborough to do the same. They more than tripled their money. With ...”

“... has lost his teeth; appears aged and infirm, clean and neat, but his cloaths the worse for wear; a green coat, his late Master’s cloaths, all worn out.’ Again there are particularities which belong to the moment of description. This is an ailing, ageing Frank, toothless and infirm – though actually not much older than fifty. The ...”

“... Man was old and wild. He was raw nature against the pasteurised alternative, that eco-milkshake of green politics, donkeys in city farms, traumatised sheep dancing to the beat of Danny Boyle’s sensational Wagnerian lightshow. Before he left London, with a cheque secured for him by a diligent Dalston Lane solicitor, Mr Mills agreed to meet me for lunch. I ...”

“... Robert​ Louis Stevenson was always ill, that’s what people said, and in the late summer of 1884 he decided he wouldn’t return to the South of France, where he’d spent the past year and a half in a house called La Solitude. His wife, Fanny, sought the advice of his London doctors, who recommended Davos in the Swiss mountains as being cholera-free, but Stevenson fancied southern England ...”

“... of James Roper, Anna’s great-grandfather. This describes a trip to the Veneto in the company of Robert Browning and the love of his late years, Mrs Bronson. The diary explains that Roper married into the Italian family which was given the Bellini Madonna by the artist in the 16th century in lieu of a debt. It’s written in a style that’s perhaps ...”

“... bit yet. Black gets pregnant. Nicholson expresses his displeasure to his workmate Elton (Billy Green Bush), who tells him parenthood isn’t so bad, he’s taken to it himself. Dupea is outraged at the association. ‘It’s ridiculous. I’m sitting here listening to some cracker asshole who lives in a trailer park compare his life to mine.’ Because ...”

“... the unending monochrome winter and the brief summers that are all leaves and insects and blue and green sparkle. His poems, one reads, have been translated into fifty, then sixty, and at the last seventy, languages (which is extraordinary for anyone writing in a ‘small’ language, much less a poet). In 2011 he was awarded the Nobel Prize for ...”

“... as it rises: blue limestone in the Vale of Pickering gently diminishes, giving way to a dark green desig­nating the chalk cliffs of the Yorkshire Wolds. The result is an intricate marbling, whose striations appear as many multi­colour­ed shorelines woven into an undul­ating whole. A key floats in the North Sea (mark­ed here as ‘The German ...”

“... into the tunnel. He was run over and killed by an approaching train. The funeral was at Kensal Green cemetery off the Harrow Road, a vast city of the dead which, like so many graveyards nowadays, seems itself to have died. It occurred to me, looking at it, that people used to keep the surroundings of their dead alive for them, but nowadays they let the ...”

“... delicate passages: as with Mayakovsky, they are mostly about animals. In a poem called ‘Lines to Robert Lowell’, for instance, there are these lines on Arthur Miller’s dog Hugo: You’re not a dachshund, you’re a slipper, a moccasin with a gaping sole, shabby with use. A certain Unknown Being puts you on his left foot and shuffles across the ...”

“... on a rock. ‘These are the stamps on the final envelope,’ he wrote, zeroing in on a yellow-green cluster of living organisms existing at a speed accessible to red-eyed witness. And accessible to this former Chicago copywriter with the profile and presence of the actor Jon Hamm in Mad Men. Welch, a troubled man, a drinker, was tall, red-haired, a ...”