“... for in this context they know, like older readers on the poetry scene, what is proper to it. But Walter de la Mare’s line ‘Who said, “Peacock Pie”?’ is not just appropriate to a poem for children. It is a real question, just as this, from Stevie Smith, is real information: Cool and plain Cool and plain Was the message of love on the window ...”

“... country. She made a thirty-city lecture tour and began a column in the Herald Tribune, opposite Walter Lippmann. Syndication in more than a hundred other papers gave her one of the largest readerships in English. Her commission was to provide a ‘cosy’ primer on current events addressed to housewives, so that women ‘would not always have to be seeking ...”

“... of art. Again it depends who is doing it, and how good they are. Craig Raine and Christopher Reid are very good indeed, word processors as sensitive as Heaney. Far from being gimmicky, as its detractors imply, this poetry is always extremely clear and direct, and capable at its best of a wide variety of effect. One of the most impressive poems in the ...”

“... brave cowboys who inhabited them. The poem was published in English in a great translation by Walter Owen in 1935: And on the spot like two mad bulls Into each other we tore; The man was quick, but a bit too rash, And a backhand slash soon settled his hash, And I left him grunting and thrashing about, With his tripes all over the floor. ‘The figure of ...”

“... in the glowing accounts of boosters like the Latin American editor of the Economist, Michael Reid, eager to hold up the new middle class in Brazil as the beacon of a stable capitalist democracy in the ‘battle for the soul’ of a ‘forgotten continent’ against dangerous rabble-rousers and extremists. Much of this acclaim rests on an artifice of ...”