“... pieces can be salvaged. We have all heard about ‘the lunatic, the lover and the poet’: but not Shakespeare nor anyone else can excuse us for being light-minded and unfeeling about the madnesses of mad poets. There are those who positively welcome such disorder, as if it authenticated a poet’s vocation. But great poetry is greatly sane, greatly lucid; and ...”

“... were regarded as culturally respectable only when based on some classic text, preferably Shakespeare; when involving some OK modern author, H.G. Wells, Maugham, Greene, Huxley or the like; when starring players famous in the legitimate theatre, Olivier, Richardson, Laughton: or when wrapped in a European reputation, such as Garbo’s or ...”

“... death in 1658 – he was the de facto laureate to the new state. He also became tutor to William Dutton, who was a member of Cromwell’s household. At this time Marvell was referred to as ‘a notable English-Italo-Machiavellian’ – for reasons that are mysterious he had the reputation of being a crafty and powerful figure. In 1657 he entered the ...”

“... in his pantheon of practitioners, but Dillon’s responsiveness is wide, to Virginia Woolf, to William Gass, to Susan Sontag, to Lester Bangs and to Roland Barthes (his first and most important inspiration). Most practitioners regard essay-writing as a sideline – Davenport set store by his stories, so much less vital than his non-fictional prose – but ...”

“... mindTo keep itself from noyance.Come across this said (I think) by Rosencrantz. As so often with Shakespeare you wonder what sort of life he led, how he came to know this. It takes in most of Larkin’s life.A regular from Arlington House walks down the crescent, stiff as a ramrod, upright, respectable. By his side and pressed as firmly into the seam of his ...”

“... Newspaper Axis, American newspaper owners are shown putting their weight behind isolationism, what William Randolph Hearst preferred to call ‘America first’. He commissioned Hitler and Mussolini to write for his many newspapers (at $1 a word), and was delighted that Hitler had restored ‘character and courage’ to Germany. At a time when most Americans ...”

“... of his closest friendships remained formal, mediated through books; his longstanding translator, William Weaver, recalled Calvino flinching every time he was obliged to call him ‘Bill’. In a preface to Numbers in the Dark, a collection of short and very short stories, Calvino’s widow, Esther, quotes a note from 1943 that she discovered among his ...”

“... showed that nightmares are the dream History is made of. of. Just like Goya, only worse. Just like Shakespeare in Macbeth, though not happening in Scotland in the remote past, but now, today, in the murky waters of present-day politics where the ceremony of innocence – a baptism in fetid fonts – is drowned in obscene shouts: Heil Hitler! Evviva Il ...”

“... Such lists can be dispiriting, and it could be said of this one that it had too little Shakespeare and no short poems at all (in such contexts, ‘great’ means ‘long’). But though there were omissions, there were no silly inclusions; Homer and Virgil and Chaucer accompanied Stendhal and Jane Austen, Dickens and Tolstoy and Henry James; and ...”

“... it accounted for their high electricity bills. And she couldn’t comprehend his taste for Shakespeare (‘old-fashioned’). When Schwartz appeared one day carrying Hart Crane’s The Bridge, she was appalled that such a small book cost three dollars. Even summer camp offered no respite: Rose came along to help out and humiliated her son by following ...”

“... Bishop had many devoted friends at Harvard (as Millier notes), ranging from Octavio Paz to William Alfred and Robert Fitzgerald, and in her writing courses found students whom she admired and liked, both male and female. She also found a new person to love, Alice Methfessel, the administrative assistant at Kirkland House (the student residence where ...”

“... as it was possible to get – was first heard soon after war broke out in September 1939. William Joyce, aka Lord Haw-Haw, delivered his commentaries on the progress of the war from a studio in Hamburg with a brio that made him, in Stourton’s words, a ‘genuine star at a time when the BBC was still dominated by the cult of anonymous authority, by ...”

“... of the poem suggests a quite dissimilar literary world, toughly at ease with its own brutalities. William Pritchard has written well on the vivacity the younger Larkin learned (with Auden, it has to be added, as a forerunner) from the playful rhythms and rememberable idioms of dance-music lyrics. His cool plotting and harshly humorous caricatures seem to me ...”

“... Beginner, published in 1966, about living in Cairo as a child between the wars: her father, Sir William Goodenough Hayter, was a judge with the Anglo-Egyptian Service, a vital arm of the British Protectorate running the country from the wings. There were many prints of Egypt in our Zamalek flat – picturesque views of the ruins and the pyramids and Old ...”

“... of machine for grinding general laws out of large collections of facts.’ He eventually found Shakespeare ‘so intolerably dull that it nauseated me’. But the imaginative arts lined up to pay tribute. In Cambridge, Ian McEwan and A.S. Byatt spoke about their ‘literary relationship with Darwin’. The joint Yale-Cambridge museum homage, Endless ...”