“... freaks Who call themselves intellectuals To believe that he is saying Quelque chose très deep, ma foi! Often Brett throws in some jokey shards, but the fact that a parody may, among other things, be a joke about poetry doesn’t mean that a joke about poetry is necessarily a parody. When lovely woman stoops to folly The evening can be awfully ...”

“... have been preached in 1690 to the followers of King Billy; yet the Swinging Sixties are coming. Ma has glamorous outfits and the film has a Van Morrison soundtrack. When he is caught up in the looting of a supermarket, Buddy snatches the latest must-have, a box of biological washing powder. There is a sense of opportunity in the air that anyone brought up ...”

“... to Crofts, one of his old masters at Westward Ho!; a scatter of references in letters to his son John at school (c. 1912) about avoiding chaps who engage in ‘beastliness’; a 1917 letter to an unidentified friend about the friend’s son (or nephew?) who has obviously just been expelled from Westward Ho! for said ‘beastliness’; and a 1928 entry from ...”

“... them. The greatest poet to have put the cult of images at the heart of his poetics, Baudelaire (‘Ma grande, mon unique, ma primitive passion,’ he called it) wrote an anti-ekphrasis on the subject. ‘Les phares’, the poem says (lighthouses, pictures by Rembrandt and Goya and Delacroix), are designed to be seen from ...”

“... This is not how things were done when we were at the schools.’ This is not John Major yearning to get back to basics: it is Pope Innocent IV writing to the schools of Paris in the middle of the 13th century. There is nothing new about politicians aching to stick their noses into the management of education, nor about their belief that because they have received education, they know all about it ...”

“... of this year Tony Benn took part in a radio discussion on the working of Parliament, together with John Biffen and Roy (Lord) Jenkins. Asked by the chairman, Peter Hennessy, if he did not think that the Lords now functioned as a ‘focus of opposition’, Benn responded that it was, instead, ‘part of an attack on democracy. After all, why bother to vote in ...”

“... Pavements considerably, all the while enjoying a well-rounded private life: after an affair with John Gilbert, she took up with young buck Gary Cooper ... You can feel Nemesis coming on with every drop of a name. Sure enough: Her bedroom was chock-a-block with gardenias and tuberoses; it glowed with the flicker of several dozen candles. In this shrine to ...”

“... publishers in the 1960s. The one anomaly in Harwood’s bibliography is his inclusion, along with John Ashbery and Tom Raworth, in Volume 19 of the Penguin Modern Poets series, published in 1971. The groupings that Penguin came up with in this admirable series tended to be hit or miss. But the combination of Ashbery, Harwood and Raworth is an interesting ...”

“... decisions: they would take up the lease on Hogarth House; they would get a bulldog and call it John; and they would buy a printing press. ‘I am very much excited at the idea of all three,’ she wrote in her diary, ‘particularly the press.’ As it happened, a combination of illness and lack of funds meant that the printing press would be repeatedly ...”

“... swirling poetry of the difficult life. The Scottish singer Lulu is Pelzer in a feather boa. ‘To ma mammy and ma daddy,’ she starts off. ‘This would not have been possible with you here, but would never have been possible without you.’ As dedications go, this is pretty scruffy, but you soon see how beautifully it ...”

“... Tower of Blue Horses; a Monet of yachts on a river; Duncan Grant’s Dancers, a cornfield by John Nash. The one original was a watercolour by T.A. McCormack dominated by a Chinese fish plate. Over the years all this moved towards something prettier; the first impulse to modernity was not wholly sustained. Happiness was a professional matter because I ...”

“... the French Republic. Just before the arrests, an English medical student studying in Edinburgh, John Edmonds Stock, had been sent down to London by Watt with a letter to the London Corresponding Society inviting them to mount a similar insurrection. Hearing just in time that he was a wanted man, he disappeared, to resurface later in Philadelphia, where he ...”

“... and Expressionism; in the readymade and in Dada’s exploitation of industrial raw materials (John Heartfield’s political photomontages would have been impossible without collage); and even Abstract Expressionism (as Clement Greenberg argued, the little pockets of ‘depth’ that pucker the surfaces of Cubist paintings presage the hills and crannies in ...”

“... Smith, provost of the Academy and College of Philadelphia; or again, Ralph Izard, Silas Deane and John Adams, who were in the 1770s and 1780s Franklin’s fellow diplomats in Paris. After 1765, Franklin seems to have hated the entire English nation as well. It was too corrupt to be reformed, he wrote in 1780; and in 1781 he concluded that the English had ...”

“... awash with Dante translations: Laurence Binyon’s in the Thirties, Dorothy Sayers’s in 1949, John Ciardi’s in 1955, Mark Musa’s in 1971, C.H. Sisson’s in 1980, not to mention an Inferno by assorted poets broadcast by the BBC’s Third Programme in 1961, the prose versions by John Sinclair and Charles ...”