“... in 1987 he has lived in many places: in Germany, with which he has a special affinity, and in Allen Ginsberg’s apartment in the East Village, and in China and Japan. There is nowhere in Seiobo There Below that does not feel stamped with eyewitnessed detail. The illusion of omniscient stream of consciousness, of run-on sentences that fold the world into ...”

“... Television Was a Baby Crawling towards That Deathchamber.’ These words are by Allen Ginsberg, writing in 1961, the title of a poem anathematising America. ‘It is here, the long Awaited bleap-blast light that Speaks one red tongue like Politician.’ The most chilling word in Ginsberg’s title strikes me as ‘That ...”

“... bombing crews – I feel sympathetic and sorry for both of them. Jarrell wrote to his wife about Allen Tate’s ‘Ode to Our Young Pro-Consuls of the Air’, a poem which ends with the Dalai Lama being exterminated from the air, saying it was ‘certainly poor and annoying … I thought the Dalai Lama almost the only touch of imagination.’ When he wrote ...”

“... of Liberation for the Demystification of Violence at the Roundhouse. His sobering report had Allen Ginsberg and R.D. Laing, Trocchi, Michael X, and other disparate luminaries of the International Times devouring every word. We wanted to hear the worst, the spidery voice of doom: the prophetic voice of the Ancient of Days, Blake’s voice hallucinated in ...”

“... home and studio in Hertfordshire. During her visit she impressed him by correctly identifying a wood carving as a Miró, and he wrote soon afterwards to offer her ten major pieces. Four of his sculptures eventually came to Tehran, including two massive bronzes that have reclined in the museum gardens ever since.Pahlavi made overtures to Andy Warhol through ...”

“... all things without them jar But in their breasts raised up a civil war. According to Anthony à Wood’s Athenae Oxonienses, and Sidney Lee who follows Wood in the DNB, Order and Disorder is the work of Sir Allen Apsley (1616-83). The poem described by Lee as ‘rarely ...”

“... glimpse of public opinion’ is provided by hostile editorials in the Daily Telegraph and the Wood Green, Southgate and Palmers Green Weekly Herald. Sandbrook’s most substantial charge against the British antiwar and student movements is that they were an ersatz creation, copying ‘the style of American protest movements because they thought they were ...”

“... that Dr John became more widely known. Backed by New Orleans royalty the Meters, and produced by Allen Toussaint, the album yielded the top-ten hit ‘Right Place, Wrong Time’ as well as ‘Such a Night’, which Rebennack played at the Band’s final concert in 1976, as recorded in Martin Scorsese’s documentary The Last Waltz (1978). Rebennack never ...”

“... the dead feline, and it’s there, the nutty smell of gun oil from weapons heated in the sun, the wood smoke smell from Belli’s clothing, and mixed with all these ranker odours, the sweet, rather mysterious scents that were ever about the high forest.’ The beaters slung the leopard from a pole and carried it back to the plantation bungalows, singing a ...”

“... in July 1970, he had another breakdown and was admitted to Greenwoods Nursing Home in St John’s Wood. This was too much for Blackwood. ‘I am going away,’ she wrote to say. ‘If I see you when you are so sick I know everything between us will become distorted and destroyed. Your sickness is so distressing to me and I am so bound up with you that I ...”

“... eyes would light up with that sparkle normally reserved only for riding horses and chopping wood,’ a White House aide reported. Reagan clung to the belief that SDI could create an impermeable shield which would protect Americans from nuclear attack – a view no serious scientist shared. The Russians had experimented with missile defence systems and ...”

“... taken upstairs by Henry James Sr to bless his three-month-old son William. It was, as Gay Wilson Allen remarks in his biography of James, ‘a prophetic event for the future philosopher of Pragmatism’.) ‘shakespeare,’ Emerson says, ‘will never be made by the study of Shakespeare,’ and he warns on another occasion that ‘meek young men grow up in ...”

“... by Rupert Murdoch’s HarperCollins, which has published the Tolkien oeuvre since taking over Allen and Unwin in 1990. Humphrey Carpenter’s 1977 authorised biography and his 1981 edition of the Letters were also originally published by Allen and Unwin and are now with HarperCollins.I don’t want to defend Tolkien or ...”

“... or worse? Interesting as these questions are, if you focus on them too narrowly you can miss the wood for the trees. Some of Donne’s best religious poems have nothing to do with inter or intra-confessional controversy or division. ‘If Poisonous Minerals’ points out how strange it is that Christianity’s threat of eternal torture applies only to ...”

“... for not being commented on – there’s no weary acknowledgment of her parents’ love of Edgar Allen Poe. The arbitrarily invoked Gothic strain is taken fairly far: ‘Sometimes in the night she would call out this name, her own, “Lenore!” in a strong urgent voice, and Helen in her own room would shudder and cry a little.’ Then there are heightened ...”