“... with the San Francisco Review in 1962. Davidson quotes two lines from ‘Blood from the Stone’, the first poem Oppen wrote after the dream, and the tenth of some forty in the new book, most of them bigger, all of them less cagey, than anything in Discrete Series: Everything I am is Us. Come home. In Davidson’s gloss, ‘the early 1960s in ...”

“... vocation, for himself and his successors’. The Larkin-Davie standoff oversimplifies matters, as Robert Lowell intimated when he said that the two poets who meant most to him were Pound and Hardy. This might seem an unlikely double-act, yet more than half a century earlier Pound had suggested that Hardy be included in an anthology of Imagist poetry, and had ...”

“... I wonder what you think of these?’Tolkien wrote many letters to his Catholic correspondents, Robert Murray, a Jesuit priest, and Peter Hastings, who owned a religious bookshop in Oxford, attempting to prove that this fake universe he had constructed was neither heretical nor blasphemous but entirely harmonious with orthodox theology. Where had orcs come ...”

“... periodically reverts to a hirsute beast in Virginie Despentes’s torrid first-person rewrite of Robert Louis Stevenson (its title winningly translated as ‘Hairs on Me’). The creatures are present because short stories make it their business to speculate about an otherness they do not have time to investigate, and animals are far-reaching analogies. They ...”

“... how he tried to convince Liebowitz, who made her reputation with portrait assignments for Rolling Stone, that she, too, should do joiners. They worried her because ‘they had extended the limitations and she was now working under some artificial limitations.’ But she also felt that they were his style. To copy the technique would be unoriginal. For ...”

“... records or laying plans to snuff her out. Prominent among these writers are Milo Speriglio and Robert Slatzer (a bit of a cross-category-turn this last one: he claims to have been married to Monroe for three days). There is a new addition to this group, a hysterical book by Donald H. Wolfe which may just prove to be the conspiracy sub-genre’s reductio ad ...”

“... accounts for the civil war of the 15th.’ ‘Discuss,’ as they say in exam papers. Lawrence Stone contributes a long article on ‘The Residential Development of the West End of London in the 17th Century’, which combines the two subjects on which he is always at his best – architecture and the aristocracy. Much land to the west of the City passed ...”

“... windows, and kicked in the metal, bawling and spitting at the alarmed passengers cowering inside. Robert Johnston’s murder, in the broad daylight of Rottenrow, brought a great deal of feeling against Irish Catholics and their Glaswegian offspring, some of which has never entirely gone. The riot in the East End seemed, to many, like the behaviour of a ...”

“... to the Freeze generation. The names he mentions, especially Josef Beuys and Bruce Nauman, but also Robert Gober, Ashley Bickerton and Jeff Koons, certainly make sense when we look at much of the work on show in Sensation – although, naturally enough, everything that the Young British Artists (more affectionately known as YBAs) absorbed has been given a ...”

“... differently.’Analogy – Nero for George I, say, or the Roman imperial enforcer Sejanus for Sir Robert Walpole – was one way of speaking in order to be understood differently. Others were allusion, ellipsis, circumlocution, irony (including mock forms such as mock epideixis, elaborately praising something unpraiseworthy so as to undermine it) and ...”

“... NoViolet Bulawayo​ intended to write a non-fiction account of the 2017 coup that deposed Robert Mugabe and made Emmerson Mnangagwa, his one-time deputy, the third president of Zimbabwe. But she couldn’t keep up with the changing political situation. There was a sense of bitterness: the coup wasn’t the new beginning many had hoped for ...”

“... an actor’s own, that one feels with Cagney and Bogart and Stanwyck; let alone, as with Robert Mitchum, a dangerous allure, or, as with Gloria Grahame, an unbetrayable charm that makes her stand out in any crowd. Yet between 1938 and 1962, he played comic and serious parts with a versatility, a variety of lights and shades that puts him easily in ...”

“... Roundhouse, the former engine-turning shed. Stuart Montgomery, the publisher of Gunslinger (and of Robert Duncan, Gary Snyder, Basil Bunting, David Jones and Roy Fisher), a wispy-moustached medical man with a significant hobby, decided to do something about the sluggishness and indolence of mainstream critics. He flew off to Las Vegas and took a cab to the ...”

“... set of fortifications on the bluff on the far side of the river, a sprawling polyhedron of grey stone walls and ramparts and towers, like a mini Edinburgh perched on the banks of the Rhine. Of course I’d heard of West Point, where the officer class of the US military is trained. I’d just never known exactly where it was, and hadn’t expected to see ...”

“... when the problem becomes interesting, sets it aside – a bad habit he shares with his mentor Robert Nozick.1 Feldman writes, for example: It is appropriate for us to favour – not to impose – certain substantive constitutional outcomes, particularly those that guarantee equal treatment of all Iraqis, regardless of sex, religion and so forth. But the ...”