“... before your fascinated gaze. The mechanism in its complacent little box is as remorseless as Edgar Allan Poe’s tell-tale heart and as silent as Conan Doyle’s dog that didn’t bark. It’s the silence that drives you mad. A second site visit was arranged. A second site visit was cancelled. Indulging my native paranoia, I believed that they must have ...”

“... perhaps barely conscious echoes and inheritances: like that piercing moment in Moby-Dick when the wind brings (or seems to bring) to the fated men far out at sea the smell of harvesting in a distant land, surely recalling Coleridge’s salty memory of a ‘hidden brook/In the leafy month of June’. In a comic Indian Army yarn by Kipling, the nightmare ...”

“... calling Snodgrass ‘one of your better imitators’ and saying: ‘You tell things – but never wind up with your own darling gestures, the way he does … I went straight through Life Studies again and there is not a trace of it, and that is really “masculine” writing – courageous and honest.’ In 1974, Lowell wrote to Bishop: ‘By the way is a ...”

“... English possesses a one-word equivalent of the kippers, cast on flames, that billow smoke into the wind as the ‘grey, undecided’ snowflakes drift down on them. In Proust the novel proceeds for the next forty pages to describe a scene from the narrator’s childhood, peopled by his family. Every reader was once a child. In Powell, it moves to scenes in a ...”