“... The woman is dressed as a giant rabbit and refuses to take the reporter seriously. When he asks her to remove ‘the bunny head’ she complies, only to reveal that she is wearing a vampire mask under it. My recent interview with Frederick Seidel, ostensibly for the Village Voice, was marginally less successful than this. In keeping with his ...”

“... resources into the project to ensure that it would be too expensive to cancel by the time he got back. By his account, a ‘huge, apoplectic, stand-up row ensued’, as much about the play’s lack of narrative structure as about its ‘controversial content’, before MacTaggart, who knew original work when he saw ...”

“... was an elegy rather than a protest poem:Those who loved them remember their child’s laughter.But he whose hate has robbed himOf their goodWill come to weep by night above their graves.Di Prima, by now a poet and publisher herself, offered to publish a collection of Lorde’s poems. First Cities came out during the firestorm of 1968, and achieved some ...”

“... religious darkness, its democracy, its philosophical depth to rival Europe, and its fecundity’. He examines The Adventures of Augie March, The Crying of Lot 49 and Wise Blood, books ‘in which the new authority of unmarked, universal man could be borrowed and spread, and yet where its contradictions and gaps would come into relief’. His analysis of ...”

“... A man has been mistaken for somebody else. He has been kidnapped, forced to drink a bottle of bourbon and sent off to meet his death in a stolen car. He survives, and decides it is time to get things straight. He bribes his way into the hotel room of the man he is supposed to be ...”

“... Oxonienses, and Sidney Lee who follows Wood in the DNB, Order and Disorder is the work of Sir Allen Apsley (1616-83). The poem described by Lee as ‘rarely accessible’, now easily accessible in David Norbrook’s modern spelling edition, offers according to Norbrook ‘a particularly strong corrective to the conventional view that literature after 1660 ...”

“... to LA, I took my seat in the upstairs dining room opposite a Cincinnati salesman and his wife. He sold screws – really. Just as improbably, I had sold my first novel to the movies. The tablecloth, the silverware, the crystal wine glasses, the Chateaubriand being carved in front of us at five hundred miles an hour felt extraordinary, a swank unreality ...”

“... keep in hard covers’. Five days later, Williams got a rejection letter from a university press he’d been trying to interest in a collection of his poems. The letter quoted a reader’s report: his imagery was ‘banal’, his philosophical musings ‘scarcely worthy of serious consideration’.Williams, who was 41 and in charge of a creative writing ...”

“... William F. Buckley is still the patron saint of the American right? For more than half a century, he supplied a gloss of coherence and glamour to a movement sorely lacking in both. With his mid-Atlantic drawl and slaloming locutions, he held out the suggestion that being a conservative was a daring and possibly even ...”

“... narrator and stand-in – explain that, in reputation-building terms, ‘longevity is genius.’ He comes out with this idea while discussing the case of his friend Edward Driffield, a Hardy-like figure who becomes the Grand Old Man of English Letters after seeing off late Victorian accusations of impropriety. Ashenden, who finds most of Driffield’s novels ...”

“... I was an Observer reader as a schoolboy. On most Sundays in the year or two either side of 1960 he would take the bus six miles to our nearest town and return with a paper that augmented the Sunday Post – delivered to the door that morning by the village newsagent – and its claustrophobic worldview formed fifty years before in Presbyterian Dundee. Where ...”

“... Wilson continues to impress because even at his chattiest and most off-the-cuff (as here) he manages to flavour what he says with intellectual surprise: some quick sprinkle or soupçon of conceptual magic. Here it must be that arresting phrase, the right to play. Like Beaton, the Sitwells, Cole Porter, Nancy ...”