“... of Eton have had notoriously unpredictable effects upon the flower of England’s youth. Mark Twain’s remark that ‘soap and education are not so sudden as a massacre, but they are more deadly in the long run’ by implication lends genetic engineering, as well as massacre, a certain comparative respectability. Glover very deftly plays off against ...”

“... actual absence in sensibility. In his splendidly passionate study, A Celebration of Death, James Stevens Curl blamed it all on Modernist design. It was, he implied, the fault of the architects that modern life, spent in the tower block and the motorway service station, ends with the crematorium and the black slab that are their aesthetic equivalents. The ...”

“... Hugh MacDiarmid. He was part of Roberts’s original core of poets; Roberts was less sure about Stevens, Yeats and Hopkins. But Stevens, Yeats and Hopkins ended up in the book and MacDiarmid was left out. How involved was Eliot in that decision? While Roberts was working on the book, Eliot turned down MacDiarmid’s long ...”

“... of the Reconstruction Amendments – James Ashley, Charles Sumner, Lyman Trumbull and Thaddeus Stevens – are obscure. Unfamiliar, too, are the origins and back stories of their constitutional handiwork, which Foner ably describes.Throughout his career Foner has championed progressive radicalism in the American political tradition. In an open letter ...”

“... exclaimed in a late poem, was ‘solid prayers/full of stars!’ That use of the exclamation mark is uncharacteristic of his poetry. Yet there is a sense in which all his writing is a sustained exclamation at the sensuous marvellousness of being. Reading his work, Kathleen Raine wrote, is ‘like standing under a waterfall in full spate’. Like Blake or ...”

“... an epoch in my life as did Dorothea’s first encounter with Rome, in George Eliot’s novel, mark an epoch in her life. Miller has written illuminatingly on Eliot, and the analogy might seem appropriate. But it can scarcely be thought to serve. Dorothea’s experience in Rome undermines her ego and her lofty Saint Theresa aspirations. She starts her ...”

“... hadn’t she. Like Gertrude Stein, her fellow Californian, Didion puts a period where a question mark belongs, and thus turns ordinary speech into dour, frightening pronouncement, heavy with portent. What is a hotel? An ignored symbol. As Didion writes in The White Album, ‘the Royal Hawaiian is not merely a hotel but a social idea, one of the few extant ...”

“... his enthusiasms to co-Celts like Yeats and Mac-Diarmid and to the odd American, like Wallace Stevens. Thomas’s favourite Larkin poem, he says, is ‘Faith Healing’. (Larkin, of course, referred to Thomas as ‘Arse’ or ‘Arsewipe’. The two of them met once, and Thomas – said Larkin – ‘stood there without moving or speaking: he seems pretty ...”

“... as a teenager, assaulted on a bed, she claims, at the hands of a drunken Kavanaugh and his friend Mark Judge. However, the human drama of Ford’s story, her treatment by the Senate Judiciary Committee and Kavanaugh’s bizarre counter-testimony are set inside a bigger picture: the concerted attempt over several decades by the Federalist Society, an ...”

“... with similar indignation. In a review of Smith’s book and of Bioethics in America by Tina Stevens, Jonsen writes that he felt ‘personally slighted’ by both authors: ‘They do not even bother to refute me.’ It’s all a little too like the exchange in Casablanca when Peter Lorre’s character says to Humphrey Bogart’s: ‘You despise ...”

“... The only possible response to critics of his work was to ‘beat the shit’ out of them. Wallace Stevens, twenty years older than him and slightly crocked, made some disparaging remarks: Hemingway slugged him. The $25,000 African safari produced its own disappointments: amoebic dysentry, and a kudu with 57-inch horns taken by a friend, compared with his own ...”

“... half-avoiding and half-resisting the opulence and extensiveness of poets as different as Wallace Stevens and Rainer Maria Rilke; crediting insufficiently the crystalline inwardness of Emily Dickinson, all those forked lightnings and fissures of association; and missing the visionary strangeness of Eliot. And these more or less costive attitudes were ...”

“... and subsequently his job as a publisher; William Carlos Williams had his medical practice; Wallace Stevens had his insurance office; Philip Larkin had his obligations as a university librarian. Auden had prose. Lots of it: several of his New Yorker reviews weigh in at well over eight thousand words, though he economised on effort, and maximised his income, by ...”

“... about their relationships to other people. Donoghue’s defence of buried metaphors is, however, a mark of the thoughtful evenhandedness that runs through this book. He tends to reflect in a sceptical way on what has been said about metaphor, quietly arguing with critical authorities without pressing the argument too far in one particular direction. The ...”

“... have followed in Thomas’s footsteps. When Seamus Heaney was commissioned to write a poem to mark the centenary of the outbreak of the First World War, he remade ‘As the team’s head-brass’ as the story of a soldier’s homecoming. His poem, too, was to serve as a valediction: ‘In a Field’ was one of Heaney’s last works. Thomas had been among ...”