“... of ATV’s Escape into Night (1972). In this faithful adaptation of Catherine Storr’s novel Marianne Dreams, a young boy convalesces in a forbidding old house which is gradually surrounded by gigantic rocks, each equipped with a single luminous red eye, which close in on him as his illness progresses. The series went out at teatime on ITV but was more ...”

“... about poets – Yeats, Hughes, Frost, Bishop, Dickinson, Stevie Smith, Lowell, Montale, Pessoa, Marianne Moore, H.D., Tsvetaeva, Arnold, Auden, Graves, Heaney, Day-Lewis – whose idiom is peculiarly distinctive (Day-Lewis being the possible exception, but Muldoon, characteristically tricky, chooses to write about a poor poem by him called ‘A ...”

“... the other? It’s unclear. He enrolled in the Ali Akbar Khan College of Music and studied the North Indian classical tradition: strange new tunings and mind-expanding microtones. The discipline of repetition, the rigour of improvisation. Quiet that intrusive ego! You don’t ‘make’ music, you prepare to let it arrive. The first public performance of ...”

“... in insurance; wife and daughter; quiet life in Hartford, Connecticut; never travelled outside North America; the usual run of prizes towards the end of his life. I’ve never felt the need for a biography. And now that I’ve read this one by Mariani, a serial biographer of poets (he has notched already, among Americans, Williams, Crane, Lowell and ...”

“... life investigating. Bishop, one suspects, knew rather more about real birds than Shelley did; like Marianne Moore, she prided herself on her ability to capture the feel of different species through accurate observation: Black-and-white man-of-war birds soar on impalpable drafts and open their tails like scissors on the curves or tense them like ...”

“... much the same applies to the campaign currently being waged by what Michael Heseltine calls ‘our North American press’ – that is to say, the Murdoch and Black empires – against Britain forging closer ties in Europe. As Conrad Black has lived here for a dozen years, obviously cares about the country and does not own a British tabloid, it is a little ...”

“... life Flannery O’Connor lived with her mother, having been forced by illness to return from the North, where she had intended to stay and write. Regina’s own taste in books ran to something that had Frank Buck in it and a lot of wild animals. Her father, who died of lupus when Flannery was 15, had been a real-estate man with some kind of interest in ...”

“... the country had lost ‘its wife, its daughter, its mother, its confidante … its conscience, its Marianne’; French cinema had ‘faded’, no one would again embody ‘liberty and beauty’ as she had; ‘tears will flow.’ Bardot was one of France’s greatest creations and an asset for the country. In ‘Brigitte Bardot and the Lolita Syndrome’, a ...”

“... the Nauset beaches? Who would? Yet she pulls it off, and we are slack-jawed and mildly horrified. Marianne Moore would say that she is ‘too unrelenting’ in The Colossus, her first book of poems; Robert Lowell would put the same thought another way by saying that in Ariel she was playing ‘Russian Roulette with six cartridges in the cylinder’. I also ...”

“... figure of the French state symbol on the chamber wall above his ceremonial chair. “There is Marianne,” said he with another cautious smile but with an echo of laughter in his voice, “and here are we. She so white, and we so black.” ’ From the outset of his career as a journalist in Africa, Davidson has found much to say about the ...”

“... can’t manage the same feat, though the deluge might quench some forest fires. The storm drifts north along the Athabasca River up to the vast tar sands where water fallson the miles of hot bitumen, filled the enormous dumps of heavy-haul mega-trucks, hit the tailings ponds that threatened to overspill, rippling at regular intervals as the bird blasters ...”

“... of the Choicest Lyrics and Short Poems in the English Language’. Allingham, who came from the north of Ireland, included living and American poets in his anthology, whose introduction presents its contents as ‘a jewel’, creations that serve, in Allingham’s Emersonian phrase, ‘to brighten the sunshine’. Palgrave’s ‘golden treasury’ seeks to ...”

“... of the people’, the construction of the Myitsone dam, a vast and destructive Chinese project in north-east Burma, would be suspended. Then in October two hundred political prisoners were released, followed by 651 more in January, among them Burma’s most famous and long incarcerated dissidents. A festival of independent film took place in Rangoon organised ...”

“... In the year he died, Cornell remembered that he sent one of his boxes to a starlet called Sheree North, but never heard from her. When Audrey Hepburn gave a performance as Ondine in New York in 1954, he sent her one of his owl boxes in tribute. She had it sent back to his home. Tilly Losch, the international good-time girl, and a recipient of Cornell’s ...”

“... visual art, he began to form his poetic style during the 1910s; soon he was mixing with Marianne Moore, Mina Loy, Alfred Kreymborg, Alfred Stieglitz and other Modernist artists and writers in Manhattan. His local practice thrived (he later specialised in paediatrics), but still he found time during the next few decades to produce a vast body of ...”