“... was naturally postponed to the end of the war. Hoberman places the German surrender at Stalingrad close to the release of Song of Russia, a movie about the invasion as experienced by ordinary Russians. Again, there was nothing peculiar then about such a treatment and such a title. Robert Rossen, the most gifted member of the far left milieu, was advised about ...”

“... to Gelpi, plumbs great depths. Despite its uniquely complicated motives and its unusually frank statements of intent, living in Time is in fact the logical outcome of Gelpi’s methods and beliefs, already demonstrated and outlined in his two important books on the American poetic tradition, The Tenth Muse (1975) and A Coherent Splendour (1987). In ...”

“... placating and schmoozing with union leaders than with any other group. Robert Taylor’s close account of the TUC has in it some wonderfully revealing passages on these (and other) periods: none so rich as the gathering of 1 June 1969 at Chequers which brought together Wilson, his First (and Employment) Secretary Barbara Castle, Jack Jones of the ...”

“... artists like Robert Rauschenberg and Jasper Johns as well as the 23-year-old Frank Stella, the enfant terrible of geometric abstraction. Colour-field painters like Morris Louis, Kenneth Noland and Jules Olitski, whose work Newman had influenced but didn’t encourage, were also on the rise, and Greenberg had swung much of his support to ...”

“... instalment, the remaining £20 to follow God knows when, & have now got the picture. Mother & Frank [Beckett’s brother] can’t resist it much … It is nice to have Morning on one’s wall that is always morning, and a setting out without the coming home.’ Later both men wrote separately to McGreevy to say that they had bumped into one another at a ...”

“... was chaired by Tom Mboya, a Kenyan trade union activist who, it later transpired, was in close contact with the CIA. As Williams writes, ‘the US had, in fact, been well represented throughout the conference – in covert and unforeseen ways.’ Washington funded a number of political and cultural organisations, with the aim of keeping African ...”

“... more as an engineer than an architect, preoccupied with technical and industrial questions. With a close colleague and guide, his childhood friend the engineer Max du Bois, he embarked on the manufacture of clinker bricks and the design of a slaughterhouse. Such a functional building accorded better with the factories, grain silos, automobiles and aeroplanes ...”

“... death may be cheated and learn how they must always protect the sound seed from the weeds, and how close breeding makes fine types of stock.’ In other words, his ruralism entailed anti-semitism and eugenics. The High Tory Eliot kept his distance from these doctrines of Lymington’s, but like Gardiner, the two looked towards a dirt-kicking, muscular ...”

“... because you’ve left yours out.’ Tóibín is drawn to similar furnishings: ‘I have a close relationship with silence, with things withheld, things known and not said,’ he writes, and this relationship, he feels, brings him close to Bishop. As well as being a kindred spirit, Bishop is like other writers and ...”

“... trimmed his facial hair (a goatee, to accentuate his mouth) and the style of writing he adopted: frank, indefatigable, stripped back to the bare bones of wanting and doing. ‘I push. I stroke. I smack. I hold. I open. I spread. I go. I come. I delve. I piss. I drool. I spit.’ His pursuit of casual sex can seem excessively self-interested, but Dustan was ...”

“... anchor. His book will be a useful guide for those looking for a chronological overview that pays close attention to musical detail without getting into an unapproachable level of theoretical depth; it is especially insightful on Paris (1900), In a Summer Garden (1908) and A Village Romeo and Juliet. But on the question of Delius’s form, Dibble agrees with ...”

“... feeling of satisfaction. The first is Gallery Nine at Burlington House, a square room where superb Frank Steallas of his black period confront us from the back wall while in the middle of the floor, humped in silence, is Robert Morris’s big low cage of a steel sculpture of 1967 and to either side whitish paintings by Robert Ryman and Agnes Martin. No ...”

“... next. (The peripatetic paradigm is Sir Stephen Spender, but Macdonald made an effort to run him close.) Third, he was an adopter of causes and had a pronounced tendency to look for the orphaned ones. If a thing was already sayable, he would be that much less interested in defending its right to be said. Excised from the New Republic’s review of ...”

“... of sexual rivalry arose. For instance, she backed a photograph she had taken of the wife of a close friend (later lover) with a nude one of herself before giving it to him. In order to obtain her photographs, she often misled and lied to her subjects, and all the more so if they were women. Several of them decribe how she would lie in wait for ...”

“... Stewart meets the main challenge of The Tale of Two Cities head-on with a long and exceptionally close commentary designed to redeem Carton’s ‘It is a far, far better thing ...’ from its melodramatic stereotype. The scene, in Stewart’s words, ‘is not just an exercise in but an exploration of the style of dying as a narrative act, the clefts of its ...”