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“... of Europeans, especially the Surrealists and Paul Celan, and to the work of Americans such as Charles Olson, Ed Dorn, Jack Spicer or Frank O’Hara and the New York poets. When I look back on it now, it’s clear that Quin’s writing sits more easily alongside this internationalist milieu. She was always critical of English narrowness and its ‘safe ...”

“... material) transmitted such traits had yet to be determined. The prominent American biologist Charles Davenport, for instance, speculated in 1915 that ‘factors’, which he labelled C and E for ‘cheerfulness’ and ‘excitability’, combined in human reproductive material to yield general personalities which he described as ...”

“... power. Jennings’s conception of Mass-Observation, like that of his friend and fellow founder Charles Madge, was broadly Surrealist. The project began at the end of 1936 with a letter Madge wrote to the New Statesman arguing that the abdication crisis and the burning down of the Crystal Palace had produced a ‘symbolic situation’, a ‘coincidence in ...”

“... home.’ He is Gary Snyder, poet, bioregionalist, teacher. Having bought out his early partners, Allen Ginsberg and Dick Baker, he is the sole proprietor of this estate, a hundred acres of manzanita thickets, with open stretches of ponderosa pine, black oak, cedar, madrone, Douglas fir, bunchgrass – and one of the most seductive houses in ...”

“... country gentry, incensed by the long prorogation of Parliament in 1675, and by then convinced that Charles II would never accept Parliament as a partner in government, had for some years busied themselves with restating and updating the Old Cause, most daringly in the anonymous pamphlet entitled The Growth of Popery and Arbitrary Government in England ...”

“... glimpses of them in the houses of wealthier, older friends. They had names such as Hamish or Charles, wore cavalry twill trousers, blazers and Viyella shirts. Having some artisan in Lima sculpt a block of cocaine into a likeness of an Inca god then lacquer it against detection by Customs and Excise was a wizard wheeze for these dashing chaps, who, while ...”

“... disavowals (‘My worst mistake was that stupid, suburban prejudice of antisemitism,’ he said to Allen Ginsberg, although it’s a better description of T.S. Eliot’s brand of antisemitism than his own). Kenner was bewitched by the ‘emphatic, aphoristic quality’ of Pound’s speech, which was ‘of a piece with the working of one of the most active ...”

“... ascent that I date some real first belief in myself as a writer.’ As the editor of the Journals, Charles Drazin, notes, ‘while other writers have been content to climb Parnassus in their imaginations, it is somehow typical of John that he should have trekked across the Argive Plain and climbed the mountain for real.’ Even Drazin may not take Fowles quite ...”

“... world.’ The experience which resonates most memorably in Amis’s five novels is described by Charles Highway, narrator of The Rachel Papers: ‘One of the troubles with being over-articulate, with having a vocabulary more developed than your emotions, is that every turn in the conversation, every switch of posture, opens up an estate of verbal avenues ...”

“... at all. For instance, the contributions of the many Scottish Whigs like Holland’s librarian John Allen, or the historian Sir James Mackintosh, who were drawn into the circle, are left unanalysed. When he writes of ‘Holland House’ thinking this or disapproving of that, he mostly seems to mean Lord and Lady Holland. The book is essentially an exploration ...”

“... giving things a name.’ Antonioni is admired for his ‘establishment of distance’ and Woody Allen for the ‘rarefaction of images and particularly of angles … theorised in Annie Hall’. What Charlie Chaplin’s little barber is saying in The Great Dictator comes from somewhere that might be nowhere. Daney’s summary of the speech is: ‘Whatever I ...”

“... landscaping, exploring the area described by Pococke beside the artfully bifurcated River Allen and the artificial lake, admiring Joseph Highmore’s portrait of the 18th-century countess, and meeting her present-day successor in a kitchen ornamented with Forbidden Planet-style toy robots in honour of Nick’s former nightclub, Robots.This was ...”

“... country’ as opposed to ‘The World’; ‘VC’, ‘Charlie’, or even, respectfully, ‘Sir Charles’, as stubbornly opposed to ‘friendlies’, subdivided into US, ARVN (Army of the Republic of Vietnam) and ‘Free World’ – South Koreans, Thais, Filipinos, Australians, New Zealanders and, keeping low profiles somewhere, 30 each from Chiang ...”

“... Holly’s casual attitude towards sex raised eyebrows in 1958. But then this was the time when Allen Ginsberg published Howl, which seems closer to the beast that Connolly was describing than does any fictional creation of Capote’s. If Capote had stopped here, rather than one book later, his claim on our attention would by now have worn thin. But just as ...”

“... nonconformity, his tenderness and outrageous inventions. Hagiographical prefaces to his books by Allen Ginsberg and Robert Creeley align him with Hart Crane and Keats as a poet vulnerable to the world and prone to self-destruction. Wieners himself remembered taking the ferry to Provincetown with Frank O’Hara: ‘We stood again below deck by the hectic ...”