“... Paley’s activism but had no idea that she wrote, and vice versa – easy to understand when you read the accompanying chronology of her life, in which books and prizes take up less space than political activities. All gusto, fun and generosity, Paley emerges as a figure so appealing that she risks outshining her own fiction. Born in 1922 to Russian Jewish ...”

“... Hannah More blamed their editors for the decay of morals: to let people assume that you had read the entire work from which an anthology piece was excerpted, she warned girls, was no better than lying outright. In the 1840s, less predictably, Engels took time out from The Condition of the Working Class in England to sneer at the anthologies littering ...”

“... could be maintained by excluding dissent. Enrolling at the University of Pennsylvania in 1945, he read Dwight Macdonald’s essay ‘The Responsibility of Peoples’. Macdonald asked why, if the German people were to be held responsible for Nazi atrocities, the American people were not thought responsible for the saturation bombing of Tokyo and Dresden, as ...”

“... armed him to face the accumulating disasters of the century with the pugnacious resilience of a Donald Duck. The image of the Holy Fool of dissent makes a serviceable fit, here, with the popular anti-imperialism of Mark Twain, who with William James and others had organised the ‘Moratorium’ protest against America’s bullying conquest of the ...”

“... reactions in Eliot which are not patently any such thing. To say this, is to agree restively with Donald Davie, who has praised Ackroyd’s book for demonstrating Eliot’s essential commonplaceness. To Davie, though, this makes the book valuable as the exposure of something lamentable, whereas others of us may judge it to be – both in Eliot’s life and in ...”

“... the detail. His book cannot, therefore, be summarised by the reviewer for the reader: it has to be read. But it is important to notice that Rorty is not claiming that he has summed up the force and the outcome merely of the central arguments of recent American analytic philosophy. For he believes that precisely the same morals are to be drawn from the modern ...”

“... pop bottles’ was on permanent display and that ‘there are full professors in this place who read nothing but cereal boxes.’ Never have so many read so much into so little. Mythic symbols – and the dinosaur undoubtedly is one – survive in a broad range of cultural forms. This, to me, is what makes the field of ...”

“... of his biography was published in 1986. We are on the first page of this new version when we read that ‘only a decade ago’ (some years after the first book was published) Ives discovered the reason Anne Boleyn ‘had to die’. He doesn’t even say ‘the real reason’. So old as well as new readers should start here. New readers will find a ...”

“... by the poet’s enthusiastic disciples? And this scepticism soon led to more serious charges. Donald Davie was one critic who insisted that Eliot, not only in the early poems but just as dangerously in Four Quartets, had turned English poetry off its proper course. The debate continues. Eliot’s stock seems at present rather low. The second curve, the ...”

“... would be no reprise in any of the collected editions. The influence of Prynne’s early mentor Donald Davie can still be traced. Prynne owed his Routledge introduction to this man. He respected him as a scholar, but said that Davie was someone who badly wanted to be a poet, and grafted for it, but just wasn’t. He had no intention of following that ...”

“... with profit and perhaps with gratitude, a poem by an inventive, a hugely fructifying writer widely read sixty or eighty years ago when Thurber was young, although out of fashion for at least the last half-century. Browning’s ‘My Last Duchess’ begins, with a fine surprising immediacy:That’s my last Duchess painted on the wall,Looking as if she were ...”

“... Hanns Eisler records a meeting between Brecht and Zweig in London. Brecht, who ‘of course never read a line of Zweig’ (one admires the economy of effort), sees him only as a possible source of funds for his theatre; Zweig, no doubt, is interested only in adding the notch of another great man to his metaphorical bedpost. Brecht asks Eisler for a ...”

“... is light, the rules are tough. The last line could be his credo as a poet, but it is possible to read it slightly otherwise than he intends us to. The tough rules are to be used as redemptive agents for the ‘prosaic voice’ he claims is his own true poetic tone. Lapidary work on metre, rhyme and stanza will take the place of that inspiration or afflatus ...”

“... reading took place at the Six Gallery in San Francisco on 7 October 1955. Michael McClure who also read that night along with Gary Snyder, Philip Whalen and Philip Lamantia, describes the poem’s impact in Scratching the Beat Surface (1982): I hadn’t seen Allen in a few weeks and I had not heard Howl – it was new to me. Allen began in a small and ...”

“... At his funeral, ‘in the same cathedral where she had eight months before been married’, she read a poem she had written in his memory. Two days later, ready to start her life again, she set off for Los Angeles with her husband. That was in March, three months after she was first taken ill. ‘Do you think I’ll be okay in California, she said. I said ...”