“... 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 ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... Trump ordered strikes on Syria in April last year, Fareed Zakaria hailed the ‘big moment’: ‘Donald Trump,’ he said, ‘became president of the United States last night.’ As Trump dispatched his ‘shiny and new’ missiles to Syria a year later, Anne-Marie Slaughter, a former Obama apparatchik and president of the New America Foundation, tweeted ...”

“... with the Hilldebeest! The Many-Horned Hillaria! (Bernie who?) Hellza-poppin’ H-Rod! (Not the Donald?) The Grinch Who Lost Her Emails! The Ethical Wreck! Our Straight-Talking-Thick-Ankled Lady of the Half-Explained! (Will Huma be there?) OMGoddess! It should be awesome, we figure: our first sighting, not only of the She-Deity, but also of her millionaire ...”

“... photographs and things.Was there much reading going on in the house?By the time I was 16 I’d read every book in the house. There were popular boys’ books of an earlier time, for some reason: Henty, Ballantyne, that sort of thing. There were lots of self-educating books, home encyclopedias, home university courses, Pelmanism manuals, self-improvement ...”

“... bibliography there are few writers so admired and respected, few bodies of work so attentively read. To judge the value of Seymour-Smith’s approach to the life, we need to look at the way it illuminates the work. And in every genre, it seems to me, he fails to give critical back-up to his partisan zeal. He repeatedly asserts the pre-eminence of Hardy’s ...”

“... it ‘laissez-faire’, which is also a term of abuse for this odd sort of Tory. She’d say you read the Guardian: she’d say you came from Hampstead. That is the level of argument in her book. It is exceedingly entertaining, for she is an unwitting mistress of the double entendre; and it is endearing too, for there is a curious innocence about a woman who ...”

“... Last Minute (1974) and Later the Same Day (1985) – and the writers she likes, notably the late Donald Barthelme. Above all she remembers. ‘I remember the day that the East Bronx began to become the South Bronx.’ ‘My love of country, any country, is always being interrupted in its patriotic advance by terrible remembrance.’ One of the finest pieces ...”

“... permanently morose, deformed in body and soul, to be pitied from a great height. I exaggerate, but Donald Bloch’s morbid novel supports my exaggeration. The narrator keeps making hyper-critical remarks about ‘we Africans’ with an exclamation-mark. ‘How generous we Africans can be, even with our very strong diseases! Yes, we like to give them ...”

“... most of their evenings at the Gargoyle Club, dancing to ‘Oh, you beautiful doll’ while Donald Maclean got drunk. They had, she says, some ‘idyllic years’ together, though the man Cyril Connolly called ‘the London Freddyair’ had his glum moments, waking his partner as he sang in his sleep ‘I’m always on the outside, on the outside ...”