“... a greater strangeness in the French. I was struck by the slight oddity of the word ‘only’ in John Sturrock’s ‘their only honour is precarious, their only liberty provisional . . . their only position unstable’ and found nothing like it in Scott Moncrieff, although all the nouns and adjectives are the same. Proust’s idiom is the almost baroque ...”

“... at Urbana.) Inspired by ‘Taylor’, Powers did a first degree in Rhetoric, and went on to do an MA in English. In the meantime, momentously (it was 1978, and early days in computer science), he taught himself software programming on PLATO, Illinois University’s computer network. Powers sees his early development as formed by epiphanies. One such occurred ...”

“... 1923 and hitchhiked to Carmel for their honeymoon.Back at Berkeley in the autumn, Parry began his MA thesis on the Iliad and the Odyssey. ‘A Comparative Study of Diction as One of the Elements of Style in Early Greek Epic Poetry’ was submitted in December but not published until 1971, when Parry’s son, Adam, brought out his collected papers as The ...”

“... or unthorough. Lorna knew Renaissance and 17th-century literature especially well: her book-length MA thesis at Birmingham was about ‘Poems on Poetry in the 17th Century’. At the kitchen table of our flat in City Road she discovered the self-conscious relation between theory and practice in poem after poem of that period: with cheerful greed she devoured ...”

“... Thursday 27 May. Flight MA 611 from Heathrow to Budapest. The purpose of my visit is to look at Hungarian Book Week. The Budapest Daily News, which I pick up on the plane, carries a short preview of the event: a record 112 new titles are to be published for this year’s festival, with a total printing of three and a quarter million copies ...”

“... street, shouting the chorus of the gibberish song which had swept the town in 1869: Jamsetjee ma jagahoy Jabbery dobi porie Ikey Pikey Sikey Crikey Chillungowullabadorie Round the square are lighted entrances. Next door to the Alhambra is Brooks’s ‘hall of Justice’, where, in direct succession to Renton Nicholson’s famous entertainment, you ...”

“... Time, finish’d his Learning, and at his Return brought over with him two Master Ship-builders, John Deane and Joseph Noy’. In England, he sailed constantly, witnessed a mock battle in Portsmouth, saw a new bomb vessel demonstrated at Deptford and drank liberally with many a sea captain. (At Deptford, he may also have fathered the landscape painter ...”

“... Ah! il faut que ces bruits et que ce mouvement Entrent dans mes poèmes et disent Pour moi ma vie indicible, ma vie D’enfant qui ne veut rien savoir, sinon Espérer éternellement des choses vagues.                                         ‘Ode’ His poetic subjects show ...”

“... to her work. Frank O’Hara sent a letter within days of reading the interview, to congratulate ‘ma Baudelairienne actuelle’ on the central picture, George Went Swimming at Barnes Hole, But It Got Too Cold, which he said he longed to see again. He was too late, however. Mitchell was already back at her studio in Paris.As a young painter she had been part ...”

“... more serious and scientific than love notes.) The second example is a murder mystery about John Gower by Bruce Holsinger, which takes a different tack.2 Chaucer is glimpsed; he is a calculating and casual character, shallowly obsessed with his literary reputation and erotic conquests. The daring comes partly from making Gower – whose literary image ...”

“... type of lordly self-belief, nor with the obsessive thirst for fame that motivated a poet like John Berryman. His literary career is often compared pityingly with their astute professionalism, as if, authentic poète maudit though he was, he never quite got the marketing right. Certainly he never managed to create out of his sufferings the suspense of a ...”

“... express speed to provide for his widow, and can’t stop. He is not quite the equal of my friend John Creasey, who once told me he tried to keep himself down to writing a dozen crime stories a year but found he wrote 14. The Burgess production rate worked out at five and a half novels in the pseudo-terminal year. And eight years later it was his wife who ...”

“... in medieval hostel-cum-boutique hotel formerly occupied by those nutty-crusader Knights of St John. (A few grim-faced Saracens, too, no doubt – especially after Suleiman the Magnificent’s successful siege of Rhodes in 1522.) Cobbled streets around the fortress awash in the fanatic blood of centuries, but we’re in a holiday mood, sipping ...”

“... Oxford undergraduate meets a wholesome young Australian girl with powerful mandibles and an MA in fine art – ‘let’s give her an ordinary Australian name, say ... Desley.’ Desley and the undergraduate initially hit it off. But in his rooms later that evening after a heavy supper of pasta and fish, the chemistry goes wrong and the sexual act ...”

“... formula and any number of look-alike therapies have borrowed it: Al-Anon, Al-Ateen, Chocanon, MA (Marijuana Anonymous), Weight Watchers. Most are pale imitations. Both the theology and the medical philosophy of AA are primitive but serviceable. The movement was largely inspired by Frank Buchman’s Oxford Group (the same movement that gave us Moral ...”