“... advance of Axis guns’, and who ‘from that time on ... could never see Pound in an unambiguous light, or think of him as other than the most problematic of poets’. Morgan goes on to describe his admiration for Pound’s poetry, his liking for the ‘bouncy, unrancid, echt-American Pound’ of Patria Mia, and his repulsion for Pound’s politics: ‘I ...”

“... so hate anyone who can.’ Among others who leapt to the defence of culture as they knew it were Donald Hall, Herbert Gold, Delmore Schwartz, Truman Capote (on Kerouac: ‘that’s not writing, that’s type-writing’), Robert Brustein and James Dickey (‘Howl is the skin of Rimbaud’s Une Saison en Enfer thrown over the conventional maunderings of one ...”

“... and what do they tell us about what’s now thought of as a ‘quotation’? Might they even cast light on the cultural biases of the Yale Book?The scores reveal implied value judgments aplenty. Don’t buy shares in Tennyson. The 339 quotations in the 1979 Oxford Book were slimmed to 195 in the 2014 edition, but the Yale Book sends them all into the valley ...”

“... presumably involved zero actual commuting.) In his 2012 autobiography, Rubio brushed off all this light-fingered expensing as the result of innocent inattention, and announced that he had arranged for all the improper charges to be repaid out of personal funds. But as Chris Ingram, a former Florida Republican political consultant, put it, ‘Marco Rubio has a ...”

“... onto the political stage. Sisi’s ascendancy has intensified this divide, and in the process cast light on the numerous contradictions of a regime attempting to cling to power by retaining the structures of the past but describing them with the vocabulary of the new. The Egyptian parliament’s human rights committee is currently headed by a former police ...”

“... are the world to us,’ as Shelley once put it. The morning star dwindles in the growing light of day until it is no longer there except as an intuition or perhaps a fiction: Shelley charms the star into what Thomas Hardy – a great admirer though a very different sort of poet – once called ‘existlessness’. And, to add to the sense of ...”

“... Grow Old’ (1945), an airman sees row on row of angelic aeroplanes flying into ‘a bright white light, shining bright and without any colour’ in a story that gives a gritty top-dressing of Hemingway to a wartime visionary mode that anticipates Powell and Pressburger’s A Matter of Life and Death by a couple of years.Dahl’s injuries led to headaches and ...”

“... Hannity, Alex Jones, Josh Hawley, Tom Cotton and ‘the biggest ethnic entrepreneur of all’ – Donald Trump (you imagine he would relish the superlative). Like his counterparts around the world, Trump built a superfaction from sons of the soil who feel downgraded. He ‘put the grievances of white, male, Christian, rural Americans into a simplified ...”

“... to sleep’). Writing to friends became one means of doing that talking – and of keeping the light on. The poetry too has the air of something written at night and against night; his first published poem, composed when he was 15, is titled ‘La Noche Triste’. Recalling those formative years on the Derry farm, he said: ‘I always liked to sit up all ...”

“... dangerous sentence let fall by another of Browning’s characters, Mr Sludge: ’Really I want to light up my own mind.’ The equivocal qualms with which we listen to Blougram and Sludge suggest something of Browning’s odd and striking position as a writer. Post-Romantic art created for itself a ‘Palace of Art’ as refuge from the philistinism of an ...”

“... are often more theatrical than his plays; they are energised by conflict, by movement, by shifting light, by the power that came from action and unrest, such as the images invoked in ‘Easter 1916’:birds that rangeFrom cloud to tumbling cloud,Minute by minute they change;A shadow of cloud on the streamChanges minute by minute.Part of the poems’ drama came ...”

“... Grammar School, Rada and an acting job with a touring Shakespeare company in Ireland, a job with Donald Wolfit, a few years in rep, attention as a playwright for The Room (1957), and The Birthday Party (1958), sudden and extravagant fame for The Caretaker (1960). Pinter married the actress Vivien Merchant in 1956; they had a son, Daniel, in 1958. Pinter ...”

“... readiness to surrender liberty and believe the absurd. The enduring interest of this period is the light it throws, or fails to throw, on the matter of American insecurity. Whittaker Chambers is the essential symptomatic miniature here. And, when we consider how he unwittingly saved Saul Bellow for American letters, we are guided in the right direction. Much ...”

“... Late at night, or the strangling of a river To give shape to its fall. There is no candle here to light us to bed: ‘Ode to a Poetess’ the poem is called, an expansive title by McGuckian standards, but not very illuminating. The two sentences above work by the same principle, an initial ‘subject’ producing a double set of explanatory analogies. But ...”

“... radio producer, who in the early 1950s was overseeing a weekly factual series for the BBC Light Programme. It occurred to him to try to transfer the populist documentary style to the new medium. In 1952 he made contact with another producer looking for a TV project, Andrew Miller Jones. Miller Jones was an ex-Army officer with a yellow ...”