“... are not as different as you might think from puns and rhymes, which is how Julia Kristeva was able victoriously to divine that a patient who was preoccupied with Klaus Barbie’s television trial was in fact anxious about motherhood: tortionnaires > torso > io > naître/pas naître. The most illustrious Greek seer in the historical ...”

“... difficulty,’ James says, ‘would be to make and to keep her so limited consciousness the very field of my picture . . . the one presented register of the whole complexity would be the play of the child’s confused and obscure notation of it.’ Maisie cannot be expected to possess a full understanding of the doings of her divorced parents (‘the ...”

“... the poetry reviewed in the Guardian – and one could go on belabouring people writing in that field. But outside it was another area where poetry had formed an alliance with pop music and the whole business of the 1960s scene, which had nothing to do with poetry. However, some spark at Penguin Books filled an anthology with these people and pretended that ...”