“... We already have Antonia White’s sequence of unashamedly autobiographical novels, starting with Frost in May in 1933. We have her own straight account of her early life, As once in May. Then there are other autobiographical pieces: short stories and attempts at further novels and, for good measure, a set of highly autobiographical letters, The Hound and the ...”

“... either in Paris or London.’ Then, of course, it was another matter. James, Whistler, Sargent, Mark Twain, Bret Harte, Stephen Crane, Harold Frederick, Henry Harland of the Yellow Book, Pound, Eliot, Frost; from 1894 to 1914 it seems that all the crème, not to mention the avant garde, of American talent was centred on ...”

“... been published, each by one of her two daughters. She is best known for her convent school novel Frost in May, which Elizabeth Bowen admired for being both a ‘minor classic’ and a ‘work of art’. It was published in 1933; by 1954 its author was complaining that it hung ‘round my neck like a withered wreath’. She would have liked her three ...”

“... the ablest of Muldoon scholars. Much of ‘Yarrow’ reverts to 1963 – the ‘year MacNeice and Frost and Plath all kicked the bucket’ – when Muldoon was 12 and immersed in boys’ adventure fiction: his favourite books are remembered thick and fast: the Westerns of Jack Schaefer, King Solomon’s Mines, The Lost World, Kidnapped, The Sign of Four, Rob ...”

“... little ark – Not so little, I know – that sniffs the sea And rots and shivers here beneath St Mark. Every house moves in Venice, drifting down Canals of blackness to a mirrored town. How easily we slip into abstraction, And thoughts of gloom and distant things, things lost Or never won, the sour fruits of inaction, And joys that jaded with relentless ...”

“... like Edward Thomas. The first two essays in this book deal with Thomas, one relating him to Frost, the other to the English tradition – a sturdier strain of poetry than either the Georgian mode prevalent at the time Edward Thomas took to writing verse (1914-17) or the Modernism that displaced it. (A bit further on, there’s another essay which pairs ...”

“... and satellite television promise to make available. Hopkinson would probably rather have made his mark as a writer than as an editor. His first wife was Antonia White, and he desbribes how they would ‘sit for as many hours as we could allow or keep awake at our two desks. What I was writing was a novel – unpublished and happily never to be published ...”

“... the publicity that accompanies them.Nearly half a century later, Kenneth Clark, writing to Eunice Frost at Penguin about the inclusion of Braque in the Modern Painters series, which had until then featured only British artists, said:The old scheme seemed to me valuable because it helped people to understand painters whose work they could buy, and it thereby ...”

“... country’s burgeoning university system. Of the great modernists of the previous era, only Robert Frost assumed the role of pedagogue to undergraduates, taking his first job at Amherst College in 1917. Pound, Eliot, Wallace Stevens, William Carlos Williams, Marianne Moore, Hart Crane all lived by other means; though it’s worth pointing out that the poetry ...”

“... poems, the one designed to illuminate the other. The approach is similar to that in his book on Frost a few years back, and on the whole works very well, although there are times when the biographer’s reluctance to speculate about the psychological basis of Jarrell’s split personality left this reader feeling short-changed. Pritchard’s reaction would ...”

“... everyone seems to have some connection. But what? Why? Who knows, or cares, when, as Muldoon and Frost both point out, ‘all the fun’s in how you say a ...”

“... Party up and down the country, there was no way which the professors of Belgrano Studies, as David Frost has christened us, could have carried on. Many a crusade has been smothered by the great big yawn of the British public. Norton-Taylor is not and never was Tam Dalyell’s or anyone else’s tame journalist. On the contrary, he started by being sceptical of ...”

“... is as little mystery about the Grand Canal as about our local thoroughfare, and the name of St Mark is as familiar as the postman’s ring. The postman always rings twice, and there is much mystery in McEwan. The name of St Mark does not ring once, despite his elaborated descriptions of ‘one of the great tourist ...”

“... so-and-so, but …’: ‘better than us; less wide’. The opening lines of his elegy for Robert Frost are equally keen to avoid hagiography: ‘His malice was a pimple down his good/big face, with its sly eyes.’The best of the previously unpublished poems that McCrae has extracted from Berryman’s archive is about a fellow alcoholic, Louis ...”

“... on whose now deathly pale skin the sheen of wealth could still be made out dimly beneath an actual frost.’ It is wonderfully poetic stuff, just the kind of thing we expect from fables of the Orient, and testimony to the bottomless mischicvousness of its author. The narrator adds the odd, slightly maladroit touch – ‘the newborn goblins of ...”