“... by punching him out – as he would other male authors, including the mild-mannered Wallace Stevens, who had called him a ‘sap’, though not to his face. He would save his revenge on Stein for the printed page and a much later date, in the deftly poisonous account of a lesbian tiff between her and Toklas in A Moveable Feast. His parents especially ...”

“... of perception and intuition’, as Keach refers to it, is at once the sign of its value and the mark of its mortality. The image always takes a route of evanescence. No wonder Shelley is especially tender toward sentiments which, as Arthur Symons wrote of a dance, ‘last only long enough to have been there’. An idealising stance has every virtue except ...”

“... within the tradition whom he calls ‘visionary sceptics’, writers like Dickinson, Frost and Stevens, who have had a ‘lover’s quarrel’ with Emerson. According to Simic, ‘God died and we were left with Emerson. Some are still milking Emerson’s cow, but there are problems with that milk.’ The main problem with Emerson’s milk is that it is ...”

“... In the summer​ of 1935, when he was 18, Robert Lowell and two friends from St Mark’s School – Blair Clark and Frank Parker – rented a house in Nantucket. Under Lowell’s direction, they studied the Bible (with special attention to the Book of Job) and ate cereal with raw honey and ‘badly’ cooked eels ...”

“... else will be diffused to the community. Loosely directed by the head of NHS England, Simon Stevens, money, staff and new investment are being directed towards primary care – family doctors, community nurses, souped-up local clinics, systems to help the chronically unwell live at home. In universe two a counter-reality prevails: the reality of ...”

“... not merely rights, in the tradition of American poetry from Emerson and Whitman to Hart Crane and Stevens is nowhere acknowledged: so Ginsberg’s relation to that tradition – Whitman apart – is trivial because unearned. ‘The self seeking the Key to life found at last in our self’ – Ginsberg’s hindsight on his Kaddish – is a travesty of the ...”

“... to the argument about exactness and cogency on which Aristotle is to be believed: ‘It is the mark of an educated mind to expect that amount of exactness in each kind which the nature of the particular subject admits. It is equally unreasonable to accept merely probable conclusions from a mathematician and to demand strict demonstration from an ...”

“... after the sonnet, marked the beginning of Keats’s last and ‘living year’, ‘The Eve of St Mark’, could easily be re-titled ‘Portrait of the Artist as a Young Woman Reading’: so suggestively inward and original is its image of a young person wholly absorbed in a poem, one chilly spring evening in a small country town, where she sits by the window ...”

“... exercise, very often a self-conscious one, of male prowess and competitiveness. This has left its mark on gender formations no matter where, or how locally, they show themselves in American culture. Like writers of this century in some Third World countries, American writers early in the 19th century found themselves in an essentially gendered relation, as ...”

“... judicial, behavioural) in the human body. Interventionism, in short, is in his view the mark of the modern. The urge to intervene could be seen in the effort to control the flows of energy and nutrition by diet and exercise, in electrotherapy and drug regimes, and in transsexual surgery. It also manifested itself, Armstrong would argue, in the ...”

“... of Telling; History and Value; An Appetite for Poetry and books on D.H. Lawrence and on Wallace Stevens. He retired from his Cambridge chair in 1982; was knighted in 1991. Not Entitled takes us through a grim but not unhappy childhood in Douglas (‘It as a world in which everybody was more or less ill. Heart, stomach, nerves were the ground bass of ...”

“... bad and distinctively human, leads to an unpalatable conclusion. To be good at torturing is the mark of a bad person. In other words, to do something distinctively human is to display the mark of a bad person. This is unwelcome news for the naturalist project of trying to elaborate an account of the human good, or the ...”

“... The convention is established early and expanded in increments, so that by the hundred-page mark it doesn’t seem out of the question that Pietro, invited to inspect a postcard sent to Shaun by his wife many years before, should reply to what she has written on the back of the card – who or what is the real subject of Las Meninas? – by saying ...”

“... as new ones, including the Boston Athenaeum and Boston Public Library. When the bookseller Henry Stevens set out to sell a portion of George Washington’s library, he suggested that the volumes might go to the British Museum, for which he acted as an agent. Bostonians, schooled by Elia to value books charged with associations and shocked by this potential ...”

“... was nine years younger than Yeats. Both Yeats and Frost, unlike the slightly younger Modernists (Stevens, b.1879, Williams, b.1883, Pound, b.1885, Moore, b. 1887 and Eliot, b.1888), eschewed free verse; and some critics have therefore preferred to view both Yeats and Frost as late Victorians rather than as early Modernists. (Yeats and Frost both experimented ...”