“... didn’t really know or even like but who just happened to be marooned in Oxford out of term.One black mark against Larkin is that he no more cares for the work of Flannery O’Connor than Amis did: ‘The day didn’t get off to a very good start by my reading some stories by “Flannery O’Connor” in the bath … horribly depressing American South ...”

“... in the critical population has produced. So it seems, at any rate, to my generation. Recently Christopher Norris has been meditating, with his usual tact, the resemblances and differences between the Empson of The Structure of Complex Words and the Paul de Man of Allegories of Reading – a sign, perhaps, that the most neglected (and most theoretical) of ...”

“... includes a typically coloured plan and perspective for a memorial hall of 1919, black-bordered in grief.) Like all the soldier-survivors of that generation, Clough knew that homes for heroes meant rehousing the whole of the working class: Not brick and tile, but wood, thatch, walls of mixed Material, and buildings in plain strength ...”

“... and on 30 January he tweeted a denunciation of his intelligence chiefs Dan Coats, Gina Haspel and Christopher Wray: they were ‘naive’ for telling the Senate that Iran wasn’t working on a nuclear weapon. Half of Trump’s argument for exiting the agreement Obama signed with Iran in 2015, along with the UK, France, China, Russia and Germany, was that the ...”

“... like a thousand white angels dividing on the road, flees to the mountain! She, perfectly cold, and black, gives chase. ‘Memory’ is an extensive poem opening up large tracts of grazing far from the designated sites of family business, before ending at the bottom of a river-bed. It is so ‘ambiguous’, so dense, that there is no chance of putting too ...”

“... mother until the war ended in 1945. ‘My grandmother … was an old woman, squat, fierce and black-clad like the granny in the Giles cartoons in the Sunday Express,’ Carter wrote in an essay published in 1976. ‘I think I became the child she had been, in a sense, for the first five years of my life … tough, arrogant and pragmatic.’ Carter never ...”

“... to publish. ‘My book problems are complicated and I would like to ask your advice,’ he told Christopher Ricks. ‘My new book is a small one, some eighty poems … the story of changing marriages, not a malice or sensation, far from it, but necessarily, according to my peculiar talent, very personal. Lizzie is naturally very much against it. I am ...”

“... and nowhere else. This is called ‘non-referential’ – I think nonsensically. The genealogy of black dogs from which the book takes its title and which is reiterated throughout – Pawel ... had brought Perkun with him from Lithuania and on request exhibited a kind of pedigree, which made it clear to whom it may concern that Perkun’s grandmother on her ...”

“... blue, its spine adorned with the familiar gilt coat of arms; the Middleton is clad in unornamented black, suggesting a sly homage to the author’s early prose satire The Black Book, with its sardonic farewell to the reader: ‘Now sir, what is your censure now? You have read me, I am sure. Am I ...”

“... which ‘can easily become the condescending heartlessness which so attenuates [his] fiction’ (Christopher Ricks); who is ‘rich in what is given to few writers and poor in what is given to most men’ (D.J. Enright). We may sneakily feel it appropriate that Nabokov the mandarin spent the last two decades of his life in a hotel suite in Montreux – after ...”

“... frog,’ says Heathcote, who is now wading, and grinning in enjoyment at the mud which rises in black circles about his knees. ‘Very common round here, so I’m told.’ Of course, the animal is not a tree frog. Heathcote’s imagination is already providing him with a bestiary for this improbable tropic. It’s a lizard – and I see several more, on the ...”

“... stamped with power, not with poets, the Thames and the Neva rustling like banknotes, then, black on gold, the Hudson’s silhouettes? From frozen Neva to the Hudson pours, under the airport domes, the echoing stations, the tributary of emigrants whom exile has made as classless as the common cold, citizens of a language that is now yours, and every ...”

“... sound like such an ordinary, affirmative, innocuous sort of affair that one wonders why Christopher Ricks and Denis Donoghue do not instantly rush to embrace it. At other times, and for other audiences, it becomes a far more menacing, subversive matter: nothing less than a radicalised form of Marxism, a claim which must come as a mighty surprise to ...”

“... and volunteers ready to work for this were dwindling – in Edinburgh on one occasion a ‘Black Circular’ had to be sent round to remind defaulters (I was one) of their duty. As a concession, a commission was set up to study whether the Party Constitution was in need of change. Discussion of this in Edinburgh was in a mild key, largely because our ...”

“... maligned by historians and the writers of textbook history.’ More recently, shorter lives by Christopher Wright (2005) and Jeremy Black (2020; an earlier full-scale Life was published in 2006) tell much the same story. If we look further back, we find Herbert Butterfield in George III and the Historians (1957) telling ...”