“... In​ the summer of 1963, between the appearance of Thomas Pynchon’s first book and the Beatles’ second long-player, John Williams, a professor at the University of Denver, sent his agent in New York a draft of his latest novel, which detailed the unhappy marriage, undistinguished career and early death from cancer of an imagined professor at the University of Missouri a generation earlier ...”

“... compounds within each major camp: 18,168 in one month at Bergen-Belsen – including Anne Frank – out of a population of around 45,000. In one last spasm the SS killed more Jews and high-value prisoners: foreign agents and German opponents of the regime like the theologian Dietrich Bonhoeffer. Some prisoners murdered one another out of the ...”

“... abstraction and idealism.’ To this end, Nelson contrasts the different ways in which Guest and Frank O’Hara compare words to rocks. O’Hara’s poem ‘Today’ giddily lists: Oh! kangaroos, sequins, chocolate sodas! You really are beautiful! Pearls, harmonicas, jujubes, aspirins! all the stuff they’ve always talked about still makes a poem a ...”

“... leaps, arriving for instance at Eliot’s thoughts on farming via the pottery of Bernard Leach and Thomas Hennell’s 1939 drawings of discarded scythes and harrows for H.J. Massingham’s Country Relics. These are threaded together by a historian’s fascination with how the past conceived its own past. How did 1930s sensibilities, from John Betjeman to Cecil ...”

“... an effect: that of what Barthes calls ‘festivity’. Two years after Barthes’s death, Chantal Thomas wrote very well of ‘the persistence of a theoretical desire progressively liberated from a concern with seriousness or consequence’. Does that sound frivolous? The concept of theoretical desire suggests a project that might be urgent, as well as ...”

“... trimmed his facial hair (a goatee, to accentuate his mouth) and the style of writing he adopted: frank, indefatigable, stripped back to the bare bones of wanting and doing. ‘I push. I stroke. I smack. I hold. I open. I spread. I go. I come. I delve. I piss. I drool. I spit.’ His pursuit of casual sex can seem excessively self-interested, but Dustan was ...”

“... name, about a fair in a Lincolnshire market town. When it was performed in 1908 under the baton of Thomas Beecham, it got rave reviews: ‘Mr Delius sees poetry and sentiment,’ the Daily Telegraph wrote, where ‘to the conventional eye all is harshness and frivol … The result is a work of intense feeling, pregnant with rare emotion and serene ...”

“... feeling of satisfaction. The first is Gallery Nine at Burlington House, a square room where superb Frank Steallas of his black period confront us from the back wall while in the middle of the floor, humped in silence, is Robert Morris’s big low cage of a steel sculpture of 1967 and to either side whitish paintings by Robert Ryman and Agnes Martin. No ...”

“... as an ancestor by the present generation of Northern Irish poets. You find him in collections like Frank Ormsby’s Poets from the North of Ireland, and poets like Derek Mahon and Michael Longley praise him. The praise doesn’t come because he wrote about Northern Ireland – there are a few fine Irish poems, but not many. No, MacNeice’s importance for ...”

“... holds a special niche permanently vacant for those bookish old ranters (Michael Foot, Norman Thomas) who can qualify for that sort of affectionate obituary even while they are still alive, the paradox of the traditionalist rebel does not automatically connote charm or breadth of mind. In the Puritan revolutions of old, and the Islamic ones of ...”

“... necessarily, Friedman is much less sure of his ground. He places too much emphasis on the story of Frank Machon, the Glasgow haulier, who as early as 1988 spotted (and wrote to inform Prime Minister Thatcher) that end-user certificates for arms to Saudi Arabia and Jordan were being forged to disguise the arms’ real destination: Iraq. Machon is an important ...”

“... subtitled ‘A Short History of Anglo-Irish Literature from S.T. Coleridge to Thomas Mann’) – McCormack’s contribution to Across a Roaring Hill, a collection of essays on ‘the Protestant imagination in modern Ireland’. In both these undertakings, the short and the long one, McCormack shows a salutary urge to acknowledge all the ...”

“... which is mainly concerned with England, and such saints as Hugh of Lincoln, William of Norwich and Thomas of Canterbury, does not neglect the politics of canonisation, which has been the subject of several recent studies. Professor Gabrielle Spiegel, for example, has shown how the monks of St Denis and the kings of France collaborated to encourage the cult of ...”

“... actors and readers’, and the complicated webs of feeling set up among them. With Thomas Hardy, she concentrates largely on the Napoleonic Wars novel, The Trumpet Major, a work which she has elsewhere done much to raise in the canon. Dedicated to a company of Hardy’s fellow teachers at London University, this book seems to have grown out of ...”

“... who might with reason feel a sense of grievance at Davis’s historiographical bugaboo is Frank McGregor, whose unpublished thesis on the Rangers (Oxford, 1968) has been pillaged by David wholesale, yet who gave to him the most interesting part of his case. For McGregor, in several articles, has himself developed the argument that George Fox and ...”