“... haven’t read her biography); not to mention Parts of a World: Wallace Stevens Remembered, Peter Brazeau’s disciplined and rather stylish oral biography from 1983.It is Brazeau who supplies a fascinating list of Stevens’s annual earnings; who has the more picturesque quotations (about a place in the Old South where you could get ‘oyster stew from ...”

“... Netherne (with nearly one thousand patients in 1922), you could see the Victorian water tower of Cane Hill Hospital to the north (with approximately two thousand patients), and to the east the towers of what was known locally as Caterham Subnormality, full to bursting with more than two thousand mentally disabled inpatients when my teenage grandmother ...”

“... right’s swivel-eyed homophobia. A surprising number of gay men top the Trumpist pyramid (Peter Thiel, for instance, or the treasury secretary, Scott Bessent) and others lurk on its digital outskirts, but O’Neill isn’t one of them. He obviously didn’t believe his statements undermined his heterosexuality. Presumably this would be a risk only if ...”

“... a better fit. B. is solicitous if not saintly around my mother. Helps her fold up her white metal cane from the Braille Institute and calls her ‘Mavis’ in a polite, Boston-bred, upper-middle-class-lesbian-daughter-in-law way – much as Mary Cheney’s lover, one imagines, addresses her in-laws as ‘Dick’ and ‘Lynne’. B. played squash at Yale ...”

“... this haunting is clamant throughout Pearse’s later speeches: he seems to see Emmet tapping his cane along the Rathfarnham roads … or standing on a scaffold before a silent Dublin crowd.’ Whereas in the old school Pearse had spoken of ancient heroes, in the new school, Ryan noted, ‘he spoke oftener to his boys of past efforts to gain Irish ...”