“... 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 ...”

“... 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 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 ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... two discrete English gardens: buttercups and daisies, sunsets and psalms, moors and briars.Another Green World (1975) is my favourite Eno LP. (Prince loved it too, apparently.) Gently experimental and warmly formal, it is full of things which later evaporate from Eno’s work: joy, humour, sex. Tracks like ‘Everything Merges with the Night’, ‘I’ll Come ...”

“... the skilled workers of the North-East’, it would put Britain ‘at the helm’ of the ‘global green industrial revolution’, it would ‘level up’ the ‘industrial heartlands’. It was ‘a major boost’ and ‘a resounding vote of confidence’. It would ‘unlock investment’. In an especially tired cliché engendered by the very technology the ...”

“... In January, I sat in the military airport in Kuwait staring at razor wire, tents, humvees and a green plastic portaloo and wondered what it would feel like to land back in Baghdad. I boarded a noisy military transport plane and flew to a gravel wasteland surrounded by razor wire, humvees and brown portaloos. Only the sand in the wind indicated I was in ...”

“... experiment (Mary Butts, Djuna Barnes, John Rodker) was discounted, along with the social realists (Robert Westerby, James Curtis, Alexander Baron), who remain trapped in a ghetto of unfashionable leftist politics and unfashionable locations. The locations – Whitechapel, Notting Hill – have recovered, but the politics have evaporated like a puddle on hot ...”

“... were sharply cut; the spies laid their schemes not in smoke-filled rooms but by the flickering green light of computer screens. Still, it was comfort TV. It depicted a world that looked just like the real one except that nothing in it would actually come to pass. The voters weren’t about to embrace socialism, forcing the establishment to do its ...”

“... it were to be wished of all wise men and Her Majesty’s good subjects,’ he wrote to Robert Dudley, ‘that one of these two queens of the isle of Britain were transformed into the shape of a man, to make so happy a marriage, as thereby there might be a unity of the whole isle.’ Portrait of Mary, Queen of Scots by François Clouet ...”

“... were then part of Team 4; and the first hyperbolic paraboloid roof in Britain, created in 1957 by Robert Townsend for the Wilton Royal carpet factory. Townsend’s own house in the otherwise benighted village of Durrington is extant and retains its freshness. Orbach considers it ‘the most interesting house of its period in the county’. The ...”

“... with anyone but other educated Punjabi-speaking Hindu Jats’, she borrows money for a forged Green Card. The Professor is not a professor: he splits human hair into batches in a basement under the Khyber Bar BQ. Her new job is as ‘caregiver’ or ‘day-mummy’ to Duff, the adopted daughter of Taylor and Wylie, liberal New York achievers. The ...”

“... pen and ‘candle coal’ for ink. Other impressive examples of the ‘alternative culture’ are Robert Copland’s low-life ‘The High Way to the Spital House’, a dialogue between the poet and a porter, who explains: Forsooth, yea, we do all such folk in take,    That do ask lodging for Our Lord’s sake; And indeed it is our custom and use ...”