“... me, and will not go away’ – surely got its bearings from Thomas’s last lines.Jorie Graham, who followed Heaney as Harvard’s Boylston Professor of Rhetoric and Oratory in 1999, returned to that same Thomas poem in her collection Runaway. ‘The Hiddenness of the World’ works back through Thomas’s lines and dwells especially on the lovers ...”

“... Many poets​ end up having a hard life but W.S. Graham went out of his way to have one. His dedication to poetry, about which he seems never to have had a second thought, was remorseless, and his instinct, surely a peculiarly modern one, was that the way to nurture his creativity was to have a really bad time. ‘The poet or painter steers his life to maim//Himself somehow for the job,’ he wrote in a posthumous address to the painter Peter Lanyon ...”

“... London, Dorset, Cape Cod, and now in Honduras; and produced as many different kinds of novel. Graham Greene ranges as widely, but the Greene themes and style impose them selves; and Theroux has written on V.S. Naipaul’s themes. Apparently his own work doesn’t have the same sort of continuities. But we can spot, at least, a traveller’s interests and ...”

“... The new volume of poems by my Harvard colleague Jorie Graham, in its US edition, bears on its jacket a detail from Vermeer’s The Astronomer, showing the hand of the astronomer as it touches, almost affectionately, the zodiacal globe it is about to spin. Although the star-gazer cannot make physical contact with his remote field of vision, the caressing way his finger lies on the surface of the globe suggests his intense intimacy with the sky ...”

“... afresh some of the most over-described American phenomena: the Black Power movement, Billy Graham and the television ministries, the sexual revolution as seen in Trash and The Groupies. She has a talent for spotting transitions and overlaps: how the ‘pastoral’ period of the Civil Rights movement gave way to the urban black militants, how the ...”

“... It was also as chaste an establishment as a convent. One of Denishawn’s then stars was Martha Graham. Later, Brooks would say she learnt to act by watching Martha Graham dance, and to dance by watching Charlie Chaplin act. Brooks wrote in her journal, reminding herself how hard she must work, since ‘I some day intend ...”

“... earlier but similar process: Who were the enemies of the people? His response was tabulated and swift. ‘American imperialism. And Its native allies. The oligarchy, the dependent bourgeoisie, Zionism, and the ‘sepoy’ left. By sepoys we mean the Communist Party and socialism in general.’ It seemed a comprehensive list. Who were the ...”

“... it relates to significance and not to meaning. By way of enforcing this distinction, he considers Swift’s ‘Modest Proposal’. Somebody is quoted as having maintained that this work has ‘something to say’ about the Vietnam War, and his application is permitted as an instance of significance. The meaning of the pamphlet, however, is entirely a matter ...”

“... and admiration. From Oliver Goldsmith and Oscar Wilde to George Bernard Shaw, Brendan Behan and Graham Norton, John Bull’s other island has furnished the British with a series of talented court jesters, praised and patronised in equal measure. Ireland was burdened with the task of writing much of its rulers’ great literature for them. The Irish ...”

“... coherent image. But, anchor equals stability and moorings, and swallow is equally an image of the swift and fleeting – as cloud is an image of the drifting, dissolving, and passing, of all things.’ Finlay is not much given to the simile. Things aren’t like other things, they just are other things. The letters don’t mention Hopkins, but Finlay’s ...”

“... in colour of what was surveyed on black and white television with an Olympian commentary by Clive Graham and Peter O’Sullevan. ‘Under starter’s orders,’ the public address system boomed. A hush fell over the distant stands. ‘They’re off.’ As the thunder of the hoofs receded, the roar of the punters rose. The Red Cross van lumbered slowly in ...”

“... Britain for quality science fiction; what it now needed was a distinctively British approach.James Graham Ballard hadn’t read much science fiction during his boyhood in Shanghai’s International Settlement (he had just turned eleven when the Japanese invaded in December 1941), or his topsy-turvy adolescence (split between a Japanese internment camp and an ...”

“... is the Stern of the Stern Gang.) This is also Ishiguro’s unemphatic method, and to some extent, Graham Swift’s, both of them contemporaries of Phillips. It could not be more different from Rushdie’s method, or Angela Carter’s: they are baroque ironists, for whom the interest swirls and flares on the mobile and sumptuous surface of the ...”

“... again at the top, the characters decidedly smaller and the sheet itself upside down. Finally a swift descent was effected in the left-hand margin, finishing with a bump in the bottom corner, which always took the same affectionate form. It was only as she was coming to the end of a thing that Colin’s mother ever seemed to get the measure of it – which ...”

“... Tim Binding is a confident writer. His paragraphs, lengthy but under control, take swift possession of the thick sheaf of pages, imposing form. The narrative voice is modestly assertive. There is a tale to be told. The taleteller, having caught your attention, will not let go. No tricks, no mannerisms, no eye-catching Modernist flourishes: that’s the trick of it ...”