“... Mike Hart). The system worked. The managers knew what they had and knew what to recommend. They took poetry books from obscure presses (run by poets) as trade. No money changed hands. Three of my titles for one of yours. ‘Manner,’ Ed Dorn says in his extensive jacket-notes to Raworth’s only published novel, A Serial Biography, ‘is what the English ...”

“... note’, in which the dramatist is reported as saying that Christ enjoyed carnal relations with John, the beloved disciple, and that all men who did not love tobacco and boys were fools, Marlowe’s own bias seems unusually clear. Sexual relations between man and man (or man and beast) became a capital offence in England in 1533. Demoted briefly to the ...”

“... in the minding.’ Caring about something is caring that it be as good as it can be. Housman took the kind of care of his chosen (dead) authors – often savaging those who could not do them justice – that he wasn’t ultimately able to take of the man who was the love of his life, Moses Jackson. But the scholarship was not a substitute, or some kind ...”

“... whose disadvantages are not only social or physical but cognitive. The volume Dog Fox Field (1990) took its title from a Nazi test for mental function; the title poem is an angry elegy for the ‘feebleminded’: These were no leaders but they were first into the dark on Dog Fox Field: Anna who rocked her head, and Paul who grew big and yet giggled small, Irma ...”

“... knew how to strongarm a vote and how to hold a grudge. He was a rival to the stylish, charismatic John F. Kennedy, but as his running mate was vital to JFK’s election in 1960; the alliance brought him to power after Kennedy’s assassination in 1963. Kennedy’s death more or less ensured that Johnson would be elected the following year, but when he ...”

“... instructed by persons in higher rank to stand there, hold this leash, look at the camera, and they took pictures for PsyOps. I didn’t really, I mean, want to be in any pictures. I thought it was kind of weird.’ Detainees 27, 30 and 31 were stripped of their clothing, handcuffed together nude, placed on the ground, and forced to lie on each other and ...”

“... X when he ghosted his autobiography? To what extent did Ted Sorensen create the verbal manner of John F. Kennedy when he wrote Profiles in Courage, a book for which the future president won the Pulitzer Prize? And are the science fiction stories H.P. Lovecraft ghosted for Harry Houdini not the best things he ever wrote? There would be a touch of all this in ...”

“... with 64 gigabytes of RAM – and he grabbed the one that wasn’t yet fully encrypted. He also took Ramona’s phone, which wasn’t encrypted either, and headed for the door. They were on the 63rd floor. It occurred to him that the police might be coming up in the elevator, so he went down to the 61st floor, where there were office suites and a swimming ...”

“... also fed up with being mocked and derided, pulled out of the meeting at short notice, leaving John Singer Sargent to attend on his own. The British generals are said to have been horrified when Sargent opened Thayer’s valise. According to Richard Murray of the Smithsonian American Art Museum, the prototype garment resembled an old hunting ...”

“... of Mosley’s political career. Fellow politicians, Michael Foot and Richard Crossman among them, took the view that, like themselves, he was interested in power but that, unlike them, unlike Foot and Crossman at any rate, he was too impatient to wait his turn. For Skidelsky, though there are signs that he may now repent it, Mosley was a more heroic figure, a ...”

“... Himes has never quite entered the pantheon. His peers were condescending: Wright never took him seriously as an artist; Ellison, who saw him as little more than an ex-con with a pen, joked that Himes must have been the model for Bigger Thomas, the murderous anti-hero of Wright’s 1940 novel, Native Son; Baldwin wrote that ‘Mr Himes seems capable ...”

“... It is an experience in having no traditions to live up to.’ One winter in the early 1990s I took an overnight train from Georgia to Yerevan, the capital of Armenia. There were no planes: Armenia was at war with its neighbour Azerbaijan, and under blockade. Snow came through the ill-fitting windows of the sleeper as it trundled between steep little ...”

“... Pavese was met with the news that Tina had married the boyfriend she had been seeing before she took up with him. He wrote: ‘Left alone, I’ve tried it, I know I won’t make it. Made one flesh and one destiny with her, I would have succeeded, I’m sure.’ Ten years later, the day after another lover married, Pavese wrote: ‘What happens once, happens ...”

“... host at a country-house weekend. The queen had her to tea at Buckingham Palace. Anthony Eden took her to the movies. Drawbell wasn’t satisfied. In the book he wrote about Thompson’s visit – Dorothy Thompson’s English Journey, now deservingly out of print – he envisioned the ‘scene that would have been played out’ if she had been as good a ...”

“... the local maquis in sabotage operations. Although he thought of himself as a ‘pacifist’, he took satisfaction in resisting the Occupation. ‘For the first time, I no longer felt totally helpless over the death of my mother and my friend Jean. At least I had the feeling of avenging them.’In October 1943, the rafle came to Vire. Salomon Kaminsky and ...”