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“... Hardwick recalled, ‘skinny, smoking, and he was quite surprised that I had read everything.’ William Phillips, who co-edited Partisan Review with Rahv, described her as ‘one of our most cutting minds’, ‘charming even when most devastating or malicious’. Isaiah Berlin said she was ‘much more bitchy’ than Mary McCarthy, ‘but sharper and more ...”

“... punting Elvis memorabilia, pubs touting exotic lunchtime entertainment, while boasting that Bill Shakespeare had been a regular. (Bricklayer/playwright Ben Jonson of the customised moniker, it’s true, killed a man in these streets and got off by pleading benefit of clergy.) Shoreditch survived as a prophylactic, an interzone protecting the City of London ...”

“... and look, some dusty peasants); the conversation, with Pasternak holding forth ‘as if Goethe and Shakespeare were his contemporaries’; the meal, at which his wife, ‘dark, plump and inconspicuous’ (and often unnamed), makes a sour appearance; the arrival of other members of the Peredelkino colony, the dead undead; the toasts, invoking spiritual ...”

“... Stella rings from Edinburgh. She was 90 last week and apologises that she hasn’t learned a new Shakespeare sonnet to mark her birthday. However she recites off by heart, and with no mistakes, ‘Shall I compare thee to a summer’s day’ and promises to learn a new poem for when she sees him in the summer.27 March. Fill in the census form to which I add ...”

“... Criticism’ is to incite an understanding which is partial in both senses. The strength of William Empson’s criticism has always been its commitment to principles and not to theory, and this strength is clear in one of his apophthegms, itself a principle about principles: ‘Life involves maintaining oneself between contradictions which can’t be ...”

“... manage the unconscious impulses of Organisation Man, that time-serving drone who – discovered by William Whyte in the Fifties – came fully fitted with the miserable wife, brattish children and off-the-peg infidelities of a Joseph Heller novel that was yet to be written. The creed of excellence has a sun-bleached Californian feel, but it is also tuned into ...”

“... sorrow and fear, creeps out endlessly in all Joyce’s work. He uses the thing, in the same way as Shakespeare does but less formally, to attenuate the fear of those who have belief and who genuinely think that they will be in hell or in heaven shortly, and possibly very shortly. With laughs he palliates the sense of doom that is the heritage of the Irish ...”

“... worked. As he told Sean O’Casey, when rejecting The Silver Tassie for performance at the Abbey, Shakespeare did not fill Hamlet and Lear with his own beliefs, but gave those characters a life that allowed them to educate him. It is crucial, in other words, to triangulate biographical data with the polarities of meaning in the play. Once the Old Man’s son ...”

“... to compare him with another artist, who would it be?’‘It would be Picasso,’ he said. ‘Or Shakespeare, who’s a bit of a poet. People who defined a new movement in their time.’The New York Times ended a few days of self-suppression with a summation of the Trump lobby’s atmospherics. ‘For Donald J. Trump’s most ardent supporters,’ it ...”

“... have these three nights sat up with him from the apprehension of his dying,’ he wrote to William Haslam two days before the end. ‘Dr Clark has prepared me for it – but I shall be but little able to bear it – even this my horrible situation I cannot bear to cease by the loss of him.’Severn meant no harm in packaging those five months with ...”

“... the dining room: Confidential Chats with Boys (1911) by the American physician and sex-pamphleteer William Lee Howard. Dr Howard urged teenage boys to ‘sleep on the floor, anywhere: go without sleeping’ rather than share a bed with another boy or a man. And if it couldn’t be avoided, ‘keep awake with your eyes on something you can hit him with. At the ...”

“... was somehow the cause of the war.’Neiman mentions the so-called Dunning School, named after William Dunning, a professor at Columbia at the turn of the 20th century, who, with his followers, disparaged the efforts made during the Reconstruction to establish the civil and economic rights (forty acres and a mule) of former slaves and gave intellectual ...”

“... Joseph had taken a job at Branch Normal, a school for blacks at which Chester was introduced to Shakespeare and Chaucer. One day, in front of an audience of parents and students, Joseph Jr, the middle son, gave a chemistry presentation: a gunpowder demonstration in which he mixed ground saltpeter, ground charcoal and ground glass. Chester was supposed to ...”

“... some seventy feet at the Great Falls of Paterson. There’s a nice picture of it on the cover of William Carlos Williams’s book-length poem Paterson. The river makes its way through traprock and sandstone to the level plain of the city, continues north to Hawthorne, then doubles back on itself and begins its southerly flow to Newark Bay, about twenty-five ...”

“... then, blow me down, if he didn’t suddenly become Tom Clark objectivist, and start writing like William Carlos Williams. He went back to America and began writing objectivist poems dribbling down the page. I thought this is awful, a talent lost. Things were cropping up all over the place that one didn’t seem to able to do anything to prevent.You had an ...”