“... Was Hugh MacDiarmid a great poet? Was he, as John MacQueen asserts in his Foreword to Catherine Kerrigan’s study, one of ‘the three greatest poets to use English in the 20th century’, the other two being Yeats and Eliot? One can understand MacQueen putting the matter that way, but perhaps it is not the most helpful way when the reputations of Eliot and Yeats are shaking down, in the ordinary process of time, following their immense acclaim ...”

“... takes centre stage for a time – displaced by other violent attention-getters like Lorena and John Wayne Bobbitt, Tonya Harding and Nancy Kerrigan, Singapore’s caning sentence to punish an American teenager, the ‘three strikes and you’re out’ Congressional proposal to jail for life those convicted of three ...”

“... so to the extent that he is successful we hear what he hears. But then what do we hear in Anthony Kerrigan’s Ficciones (1962), which has translations by Kerrigan himself, Alastair Reid, Anthony Bonner, Helen Temple and Ruthven Todd? Or in Donald Yates and James Irby’s Labyrinths (1962), with translations mainly by ...”

“... MacDiarmid-George Ogilvie Letters have been edited and annotated in their entirety by Catherine Kerrigan, and they show how many of MacDiarmid’s attitudes and determinations were present in Quartermaster-Sergeant Grieve of Salonika. The young Grieve describes himself as being in ‘mental spate’; his intellectual life is ‘a debating society’, and he ...”

“... governess, Miss Tink. Miss Tink, for all the monosyllabic innocence of her name, had a bad cousin, John, who may well also have influenced the child Borges, because he was one of the street-corner ‘hoodlums’ who later fascinated him, partly for being so brave as well as bad, when they fought, and partly because he saw them as ideal compendia of the local ...”

“... 1640, 24 years after Shakespeare’s death. That edition, however, involved wholesale revision. John Benson, the publisher, capitalising on the undiminished sales of Venus and Adonis, produced a volume of what looked to be not old-fashioned sonnets but new Shakespeare love poems. The transformation involved both format and erotics: many of the sonnets are ...”

“... very different from each other, culminating in two formidably sophisticated pieces of work: John Kerrigan’s New Penguin edition (1986) and Colin Burrow’s Oxford one (2002). Their long, informative and illuminating introductions might be expected to have solved all possible problems. But the difficulties of the Sonnets are of a kind that ...”

“... The unconscious is sociable, even convivial. ‘The good news,’ Joseph Smith and William Kerrigan write in their commentary on Rorty’s essay, ‘is that what goes on out of awareness can also be one’s ally.’ The ‘also’ here is doing all the work. Whether or not there is something novel in Freud’s view of the unconscious, Rorty’s view of ...”