“... lifelong enemy of slavery and an inveterate racist. The most recent full-scale biography, by David Donald, published in 1995, offered a Lincoln buffeted by forces outside his control, a man of few deep convictions who failed to lead public opinion – rather like Bill Clinton. Although conceived before 11 September, both Richard Carwardine and Daniel ...”

“... by a blessed ‘St Gugg’ fellowship. While in England she made influential friends such as Donald Hall and the Plath-Hugheses, and published in the New Yorker. Katharine White, the poetry editor, soon offered her a first-read agreement.In the meantime, Rich had broken off her engagement to Sumner Powell, a Wasp ...”

“... the law for four years, we’ll make it through those four years.’ Or consider the message read out to Vice President-elect Mike Pence by the cast of Hamilton after he attended a performance: ‘We are the diverse America who are alarmed and anxious that your new administration will not protect us, our planet, our children, our parents, or defend us ...”

“... very obvious to everybody.’Standing under an array of American flags and two huge banners that read ‘America Leads the World in Testing’, the president declares that the US is testing 300,000 people a day, which is not true, ‘unmatched and unrivalled anywhere in the world and it’s not even close’. When asked by an Asian-American woman journalist ...”

“... in universities had created a new reading public, receptive to books which could only be read by people experienced in the routines of classroom explication. The economics of publishing encouraged the production of novels and poems of the kind university instructors would be tempted to write about, thus furthering their careers, and to assign to ...”

“... he wasn’t praising him for any Eliotic or iconoclastic talents, which is part of the reason for Donald Davie’s complaint a few years later that Hardy represented ‘a crucial selling short of the poetic vocation, for himself and his successors’. The Larkin-Davie standoff oversimplifies matters, as Robert Lowell intimated when he said that the two poets ...”

“... memoir, Lucky Bruce, when Heller’s one-time agent, Candida Donadio, said not to worry – nobody read Gaddis’s novels. In the city, when they wanted company they went to Elaine’s on the Upper East Side, where big book authors dined in the front room while tourists peeped at them from the back room. For something over thirty years that was Heller’s life ...”

“... He also amassed a large collection of books on the subject. Towards the end of his life, he read The Halt Perspective (2016), about the Rendlesham Forest incident of 1980, when several UFOs were spotted over US airbases in East Anglia. After his enthusiasm for this sort of thing came to light, the Sun contacted John Hanson, one of the book’s ...”

“... to his lack of a public school education, accusing him of ‘unmanliness ... especially after we read in the Times of a mother who said to her hesitating son: “My boy, I don’t want you to go, but if I were you I should.” ’ Vera was equally keen for her brother to join up and Paul Berry and Mark Bostridge believe that her reliance on what they ...”

“... too damn much of everything.’ But I also found myself wondering why Ammons isn’t read more outside the US and was reminded of Donald Davie’s 1975 review of Sphere, which he began by admitting that the idea of yet another ‘major visionary poet’ was an unattractive proposition. Still, he confessed, ‘I ...”

“... who don’t believe in climate change because they were freezing cold this winter and trust what Donald Trump or Nigel Farage tells them on Fox News or the BBC. I mean the people who stand to gain from the Trump administration’s America First Energy Plan, which will increase US dependence on fossil fuels: more fracking, more coal-mining, more ...”

“... were later quashed, and served more than three years in prison. In 2018 Black published Donald J. Trump: A President like No Other, which argued that Trump was ‘not, in fact, a racist, sexist, warmonger, hothead, promoter of violence, or a foreign or domestic economic warrior’, but fundamentally shy and misunderstood. The following year he ...”

“... Now I find that once more I have shrunk To an interloper, robber of dead men’s dream, I have read in books that art is not easy But no one warned that the mind repeats In its ignorance the vision of others. I am still The black swan of trespass on alien waters. The lines echo the description by A.D. Hope – much revered by McAuley and Stewart – of ...”

“... Grammar, with its fall-back invocation of ‘nonstandard’ (it is not a book likely to be much read by users of nonstandard English), finds itself saying that some usages are ‘nonstandard but widely current’. All of this conversation is then enlivened by the regular appearance of Wittgenstein on wheels. Philip Thody and Howard Evans, in their bonhomous ...”

“... poet, Duncan was accused by his friend Charles Olson – along with just about everyone else who read his work – of wanton myth-mongering, a charge against which he didn’t even try to defend himself. Olson, he wrote, suspects, and rightly, that I indulge myself in pretentious fictions. I, however … take enuf delight in the available glamour that I do ...”