“... bardic conception of the poet’s role elaborated in Thomson’s preface to the second edition of Winter derives in part from Hill’s critical writings). He also knew the critic John Dennis, John Dyer (the author of the loco-descriptive smash-hit Grongar Hill), Richard Savage, Nahum Tate (the Poet Laureate) and Edward Young (Night Thoughts). For a ...”

“... a discussion of Brecht’s novel A Penny for the Poor, was published in the Partisan Review for winter 1939. The previous number had contained an interview he did with Ignazio Silone, and he’d also published a few translations and pseudonymous stories. He had just turned 30, and saw the Brecht piece as an auspicious entry into literary reviewing, yet it ...”

“... best known as the uncle of the man who cheated in the quiz show that was made into a film by Robert Redford (in Quiz Show Carl van Doren is played with magnificent stateliness by Paul Scofield). The book is straightforward narrative history, but it takes its curious title from the fact that it was written at the birth of the United Nations, on whose ...”

“... connected with one of the four elements. The humours were like something beyond themselves: like winter, like delved earth, like the rotation of the stars in the heavens.What kind of person were you? Clues to your particular composition of humours were abundant. Did you tend to have pleasant dreams, of dancing or laughing or embracing beautiful women? Did ...”

“... Vendler to distort major figures helps her discriminate among lesser planets. Her inclusion of Robert Hayden, for example, is bold and welcome. Moreover, her promise to present writers ‘whole’ has more chance of being fulfilled with subsidiary figures. When Eliot judged anthologies less just to major than minor poets, he was, as often, lending his ...”

“... out of Cambridge, he led a life of more strenuous sloth than his father, foxhunting in the winter, playing cricket through the summer, and concentrating on golf in the spring and autumn, lodging mostly with hearty friends who, in his own view, satisfied the sturdy Thornycroft half of his nature while his sensitive ‘oriental’ half was nourished by ...”

“... food. Venereal disease reached epidemic proportions: a spot check in Berlin in the first post-war winter found that nearly a third of girls examined were sufferers. But Allied top brass did not stand austerely aloof. One general in US Army Intelligence took a former mistress of Dr Goebbels to New York for a ‘furlough’ in the Waldorf and Ritz ...”

“... himself, in shadow, stands watching her warily. ‘Day after day,’ Feaver writes, ‘through the winter she lay there, frigid under his scrutiny.’ While they were there, Anne Dunn reappeared. Though married to Michael Wishart, she remained, as Feaver writes, ‘susceptible’: ‘Of course then we took up again. Then I got pregnant and … had an ...”

“... outside the hotel gates. ‘What can we do?’ he asked. ‘We don’t have any chance.’ Last winter, in a converted military barracks outside Phnom Penh, the first real trial began of those who masterminded the genocide of 1975-79. Coming 30 years after the fall of the Khmer Rouge, the trial may seem a bit late. The five Khmer Rouge suspects facing ...”

“... declared, quoting Pasternak. Here she distinguished herself from her contemporaries: poets like Robert Creeley, Jack Spicer and Paul Blackburn often harked back to fraternal tropes of the knight, troubadour, jongleur. Never king. Guest’s origins were anything but kingly: born in North Carolina in 1920, she was shuffled around from town to town in ...”

“... movement, which reduced union leaders’ ability to moderate the pay demands of their members. As Robert Taylor observes in his contribution to Crines and Hickson’s book, the unions were too weak institutionally to play the role Wilson required of them; and their historic commitment to free collective bargaining was irreconcilable with the corporatist ...”

“... coup? The moment passed, but, hard as it is now to believe, in the wake of the ‘winter of discontent’ of 1978-79 many rank-and-file trade unionists saw union power as a greater threat to democracy than Margaret Thatcher, and voted Tory in 1979. The subdued American Bicentennial of 1976 had taken place in the shadow of Watergate, presided ...”

“... in the tamest example, they are ordered to eat ice cream and then punished for doing so. After one winter session in the swampy woods of Georgia, Alex returns to barracks and watches a fellow cadet pull off his socks along with the skin from the soles of his feet. Another time, Alex fractures a leg. The last phases of his training are relatively ...”

“... to the possibility – and it shows up.’ Her poems first came to light when she sent them to Robert Hayden, the first African American poet laureate. She won a Discovery Award, which was presented at the 92nd Street Y, followed by a dinner in Claudette Colbert’s apartment. This prize led to the publication in 1969 of Good Times – the first of ...”

“... is Pierre Berton in The Arctic Grail. Berton accepts the challenge with a boldness worthy of a Robert M’Clure or a James Clark Ross. Not only does he tell the story of the Franklin Expedition and the search for it, he tells the story of all Arctic exploration in the 19th century in three overlapping stages: the search for the Northwest Passage, the ...”