“... had a mannered post-humous quality. In the most sinister photos, he seems to be standing with one foot squarely planted on the neck of posterity. This camp deadpan, evident despite the bravura of the letters, was not Ginsberg’s style at all. Burroughs’s correspondent would eventually become a generous, open-hearted queen, but, like Whitman, a republican ...”

“... felicitousness, when consciousness slots into alignment with the feel of uneven stone under the foot, or the taste of a special flavour on the tongue. Imbued with the whole theatre of the French metaphysical tradition, Proust must have seen at once that this idea could not only be worked up into an impressive intellectual and imaginative thesis, but that it ...”

“... And Corbin suggests that the whole business became rather sexy: ‘the mere contact of a bare foot on the sand was already a sensual invitation and a barely conscious substitute for masturbation,’ he says, though we are not told, in any of the very numerous notes, where this information comes from. He observes other stimuli – there were half-clad ...”

“... envisioned by Emerson, who ‘re-attaches things to Nature and the whole’, to Peter Stillman, in Paul Auster’s City of Glass, crazedly attempting to re-create prelapsarian speech. Olson, it is often pointed out, is the first poet to have described himself as ‘Post-Modern’. That was in 1952. Five years before that he published his first book, Call Me ...”

“... on the Western Front increased from 3.25 million to more than four million men by April 1918. Paul von Hindenburg, a stolid general who effectively replaced the kaiser as the figurehead of the German war effort after being brought out of retirement to win spectacular victories on the Eastern Front early in the war, and Quartermaster-General Erich ...”

“... place by chance in Paris, on the afternoon of 28 June 1964. Paz describes it in Viento Entero. In Paul Blackburn’s translation:              The fallen birdbetween rue Montalembert and rue de Bacis a girl              held backat the edge of a precipice of looks. . .A marching battalion of ...”

“... out in the cold. In ‘Wooden Ships’, a post-nuclear daydream, the singers – Grace Slick and Paul Kantner – are sailing away from America, exchanging iodine tablets with other survivors and looking back at figures on the shoreline moving around in silver hazmat suits. ‘The Star-Spangled Banner’, a travesty of the national anthem performed on a ...”

“... is still Italian, however, as is the landscape, as is the position of the railway station at the foot of a hill (which probably has a town wearily high up at the top of it), as is the calm of the loos in those overly spacious Fascist station buildings. It will not do to reimagine the scene as the Lake District during a heatwave. But where does Italy stop and ...”

“... demise. He has been hit on the head with a hammer and stabbed in the heart with a chisel ‘at the foot of his famous frescoes’. An erudite murder mystery set several hundred years ago in Italy can’t help but recall The Name of the Rose by Umberto Eco, who makes an appearance in Binet’s earlier novel The Seventh Function of Language – though where ...”

“... baskets of white bread were put out for the poor. Some five thousand troops gathered, on horse and foot, as Sir John Strangways, a local royalist, proclaimed the end of eleven years of the republic. A contemporary source describes a procession of ‘maidens, at least a hundred in number’, dressed in white waistcoats and led by a woman beating a drum; ‘both ...”

“... happier and accordingly sadder. ‘If you love your life in this world,’ Matthew remembered Paul opining, ‘you will lose it.’ He loved his life. What sane man wouldn’t. Loss, he figured, stalked him with its scythe. He’d written poems. He liked the sound of words of his own making in his own mouth. He’d met with early and deserved critical ...”

“... its 3000 lbs to 26 batteries, arranged in a clumsy T-frame ‘tunnel’ which sticks up by about a foot between the two passengers – who can scarcely squeeze into what internal space is left. As for luggage, forget it. At current pump prices, US gasoline is cheaper than bottled water. And, relative to the energy it produces, gasoline is light in weight (8 ...”

“... The Voyages of Greenpeace, by Robert Hunter and Rex Weyler, told of the pursuit, in an eighty-foot halibut seiner, of the Russian whale fleets. It is all there in the photographs: the ship’s cook Walrus Oakenbough playing a flute; cetologist Paul Spong on his bunk, consulting the I Ching, and so on. But it also showed ...”

“... to the west we could see the ridges of Mt Gràmos, the CDA’s last toehold on Greek soil, where Paul Eluard came to visit their trenches and harangue the imperialist lackeys arrayed against them through a megaphone. They were driven out of their positions by US Helldivers – the first use of napalm in warfare. From where we leave the pick-up you can just ...”

“... and David have hitherto regarded as talentless, overrated, or simply wankers: Oasis, the Stones, Paul McCartney, John Lennon, Robbie Williams, Kingsley Amis, Martin Amis, Evelyn Waugh, Auberon Waugh, Salman Rushdie, Jeffrey Archer, Tony Blair, Gordon Brown, William Shakespeare (although to be fair they despise the comedies and some of the history plays ...”