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“... I have never seen Francis Crick in a modest mood.’ Thus James Watson opens his notorious account of the discovery of the structure of DNA which won him, Crick and Maurice Wilkins a Nobel Prize in 1962. Whichever other of Watson’s judgments have been controversial – notably his dismissal of Rosalind Franklin, from whom, courtesy of Wilkins, he and Crick were provided with the crucial X-ray photographs of DNA crystals – his assessment of Crick has scarcely been disputed ...”

“... in the book cover Emerson’s first visit, of nine months, to Europe. Most interesting, to be frank, because he met more interesting people – such as Landor, Coleridge, Wordsworth and, most important, Carlyle (‘Transcendentalism’ really takes off from three essays by Carlyle, as Richardson helpfully describes). Not, you understand, that Emerson was ...”

“... the full picture as he liked to see it. His account is inevitably selective but also surprisingly frank, especially about his own failings. And he is generous, in retrospect, about his various lovers. His passionate relationship with West, for example, descended into fractious bickering long before she finally ended things between them in 1923, and Wells ...”

“... and deviant Elizabeth’s first court favourite, Robert Dudley) all the way, via Swift, to Frank Owen’s Guilty Men, published in 1940. Orwell wrote: ‘A pamphlet is never written primarily to give entertainment or to make money. It is written because there is something that one wants to say now, and because one believes there is no other way of ...”

“... postscript set in Norwich. At a staid University Teachers of English get-together George Steiner, Frank Kermode and Seamus Heaney do their party pieces and a novelist – the author of Doctor Criminale, we must suppose – reads from his upcoming work, ‘whose ending he seems not to know’. The publisher’s blurb laconically informs us that Bradbury lives ...”

“... the cover-up. In February 1973, after his re-election, Nixon fired Helms and replaced him with James Schlesinger. In an initiative to regain public trust as the crisis escalated, Schlesinger announced he was ‘determined that the law shall be respected’ and that anyone aware of illegal CIA activities was obliged to report them. Nixon was finally forced ...”

“... But 16 of Hitler’s former ministers and governors of occupied countries were in Allied hands: Frank, Frick, Funk, Goering, Hess, Kaltenbrunner, Ley, Neurath, Papen, Ribbentrop, Rosenberg, Sauckel, Schacht, Schirach, Seyss-Inquart and Speer. Streicher, who had been in charge of the regime’s most disgusting antisemitic propaganda, was too notorious to ...”

“... said to myself Guillaume it is time that you came’). This trait Apollinaire in turn passed on to Frank O’Hara, who acknowledged the debt in ‘Memorial Day 1950’, in which O’Hara figures himself reading music by the light of ‘Guillaume Apollinaire’s clay candelabra’. Yet a note of uncertainty not really found in the American poets often pervades ...”

“... Padgett once called them) is often vividly captured in I Remember: I remember the first time I met Frank O’Hara. He was walking down Second Avenue. It was a cool early spring evening but he was wearing only a white shirt with the sleeves rolled up to his elbows. And blue jeans. And moccasins. I remember that he seemed very sissy to me. Very ...”

“... leave it for a while to see if it catches a gull’s eye, then put it in the bin. 24 May. Run into Frank Dickens the cartoonist walking down the stalled escalator at Camden Town Tube. Says that in Bristow, his strip in the Standard, he’s about to introduce the concept of Desk Rage, with frenzied attacks on other people in the office. About the same age as ...”

“... by Moore’s raw disapproval, and is wooden and unconvincing. Brian and Jacqueline Moore met Frank and Jean Russell in New York in 1963, and the two couples, all of them interested in journalism and writing, began to hang out together. In the summer of 1964, Jacqueline and their son Michael went to Long Island while Brian stayed in New York working on ...”

“... and unsentimentally. There can seem to be no problem. In ‘Poem Read at Joan Mitchell’s’ Frank O’Hara writes that The poem goes on too long because our friendship has been long. In the context of poetry and longevity friendship seems to take a quite natural place at the civilised table. Mention of ‘friendship’, that is. What about John ...”

“... against the British Tenth destroyer flotilla, losing two of his ships and damaging HMS Tartar. Frank D. Peregory, a US Army technical sergeant, won the Congressional Medal of Honour on D-Day for a one-man attack from which he brought back more than thirty prisoners. He was killed at St Lô six days later, before hearing he had got the award. A murky photo ...”

“... Defence, was grounded after a sustained campaign by the tireless Scot. Again, he helped to defeat James Callaghan’s legislation designed to provide a devolved government for Scotland. But no occupant of 10 Downing Street has been the target of so relentless an onslaught at his hands as Mrs Margaret Thatcher. Now, with all the zeal of a Dickensian ...”

“... shortcoming is its lack of any full discussion of the volume which Kalstone is reported – by James Merrill, in an ‘Afterword’ – to have considered Bishop’s ‘in many senses’ greatest, Geography III. The story, perforce, breaks off just where some sort of climax and rounding-out might have been expected. Instead, Merrill supplies his own ...”