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“... Writing in 1842 to his friend Alfred Domett, who had emigrated to New Zealand, Robert Browning enclosed ‘Tennyson’s new vol. and, alas, the old with it – that is what he calls old’. Browning was referring to the two-volume Poems of 1842, whose first volume consisted of heavily revised versions of poems published in 1830 and 1832 ...”

“... Castle – a nightly feast in August as the military tattoo concludes its parade. In his boyhood, Robert Louis Stevenson would sometimes be surprised while walking in the New Town to ‘see a perspective of a mile or more of falling street, and beyond that woods and villas, and a blue arm of sea, and the hills upon the further side’. I stopped at the corner ...”

“... progress, or advancing in one area and merely shoring up in another. At King’s Cross the old green and taupe tiles on the platform are chipped and falling off the walls. At Great Portland Street, the squat brick alcoves of the original line have scrubbed up nicely, but sit incongruously with the beige metal panels around the entrance. Everyone on the ...”

“... having read Auden’s City Without Walls, Grigson wrote an Epistle in which he excelled himself: Green pillows of cress In the brook which begins us You celebrate too; And up from your verses, Though many Forget them, stinking Ogres not read them, Blest by high priests Stiff generals not Stoop to reject them, Rises an odour Of essence, I say, of Ripeness and ...”

“... not come back. In the first poem in My Alexandria, ‘Demolition’, Doty invokes the ghost of Robert Lowell: many of the poems take their bearings from Lowell’s clotted diction, from what Doty calls his ‘ruthless energy’, from Lowell’s interest in burning the poem onto the page, heaping on adjectives to fuel the fire, invoking the Old ...”

“... obvious solution to anyone struggling to make a living out of writing. Scott Fitzgerald, Faulkner, Robert Benchley, Dorothy Parker, Nathanael West, all did their time on studio payrolls, and West and Fitzgerald in their respective last works, The Day of the Locust and The Last Tycoon, somehow succeeded in putting its ridiculous myths to serious ...”

“... not finally convincing. In ‘The Book of Juniper’ Paulin writes: I must grasp again how its green springy resistance ducks its head down and skirts the warped polities of other trees bent in the Atlantic wind. For no one knows if nature allowed it to grow tall what proud grace the juniper tree might show that flared, once, like fire along the hills. In ...”

“... a white refrigerator in preference to the presumably more life-affirming salmon-pink or pale green. Such a self-confirming closed circle of biographical method does not do justice either to Arbus’s work or, indeed, to her recurrent depressions. But Sartre’s to-be-famous children differ from the subject of this biography in one very evident ...”

“... to come out, albeit with diminishing frequency, until 1969. William Burroughs, Charles Olson, Robert Creeley, Ed Dorn and Barbara Guest all appeared in its pages. Producing the Floating Bear was an ‘endless rhythm of editing, typing, proofing, printing, collating, stapling, labelling and mailing’, but di Prima understood the importance of controlling ...”

“... see that they would work as poetry in the Italian. Others again – such as Montale translated by Robert Lowell – achieve their vigour by departing from the source: the danger of these looser versions is that the original will seem scanted or imposed on, a stooge. The most rewarding translations in the anthology stretch English towards Italian while not ...”

“... be read in English from 1855, Tolstoy had British and American disciples, and Dostoevsky was, in Robert Louis Stevenson’s view, ‘a devil of a swell, to be sure’. But the English-speaking world’s received ideas about Russian literature were mostly laid down in the 1910s and 1920s, the great age of Western interest in the Russian soul – ‘its ...”

“... unusual layout and typography, and for his close association with older poets, especially with Robert Lowell (he co-edited Lowell’s posthumous Collected Poems). Bidart and his poems indeed have all these qualities, but they are not the best reasons to read his poetry. That poetry – especially in his last few books – deserves to be known for the ...”

“... lost steps, from my bewildered solitude, from fear, from the entangling vines, from the torrential green, with no escape, did I come back with the secret. Only then and there could I realise it, on the precipitous edge of fever. There, in the sombre light, it was decided and made, my contract with the earth. The pact or contract goes back to the passive ...”

“... polecat in the comic strip Pogo; Andy Warhol produced a silk-screened Nixon with skin as biliously green as the Wicked Witch of the West and, in a riotous series of drawings, Philip Guston transformed the president’s ski nose and heavy jowls into a glumly expressive set of male genitalia. Nixon’s personality was even richer. Gore Vidal parodied him in his ...”

“... decided he didn’t like standing out in the cold? His first biographer (and former student), Robert Emmons, insisted that ‘SICKERT IS ONE OF THE IMPRESSIONISTS’ on the grounds that, though not an original member, he was ‘so closely allied to them both in method and sentiment, as to take his place, naturally and inevitably, within the innermost ...”