“... styles. Cary’s pioneering version of 1805 was predominantly Miltonic; in later years, Robert Morehead transformed Dante into a second Spenser, while Thomas William Parsons made him out to be ‘stately and solemn’ in the manner of ‘Gray and Dryden’. T.S. Eliot’s essay of 1929 argues against such ...”

“... helped by the untimely publication of his ditto. Graham Greenes (d. 1991) are on the way down, Robert Lowells (d. 1977, with the Collected Poems coming next year) are a good buy; stock in Anthony Burgess (d. 1993) should probably be held for a year or two; Borgeses (d. 1986) will surge once the editing and republishing are sorted out; James Merrills ...”

“... find out from De Loach if the guy who did the bugging on us in ’68 is still at the FBI, and then Gray should nail him with a lie detector and get it settled, which would give us the evidence we need. He also thinks I ought to move with George Christian – get LBJ to use his influence to turn off the Hill investigation with Califano, Hubert and so on. Later ...”

“... the Premier League action, plus Eurosoccer by the yard, plus The Boot Room, The Big League, Andy Gray and all manner of other soccer-goodies. With Sky, I need never walk again. Why don’t I then – sign up? A few months ago, when it was announced that a deal had been struck between the BBC, BSkyB and the Premier League, my answer would have been: ‘Why ...”

“... water, full in face Trafalgar lay; In the dimmest north-east distance, dawned Gibraltar grand and gray; ‘Here and here did England help me, – how can I help England?’ – say, Whoso turns as I, this evening, turn to God to praise – pray Yonder where Jove’s planet rises silent over Africa. Militaristic? Imperialistic? Was Browning really so sold on ...”

“... Dan Bern. His parents moved to Mount Vernon, Iowa, where Bern was born, round about the time that Robert Zimmerman started calling himself Bob Dylan and left Hibbing, Minnesota, to head circuitously east for New York City. Where Bern stands in relation to Dylan isn’t straightforward. He isn’t anything so crude as a tribute act: he performs his own ...”

“... humped, who kills dead. There is a tall who loves only him. She has sworn ‘Blue to you forever, Gray to the little rat, go to bed.’ I fink it’s bads all over.It ends: Henry and Mabel ought to but can’t. Childness let’s have us honey –‘It set the prosodic pattern,’ Berryman told the interviewer, Peter Stitt, who had been a student of his a few ...”

“... dearest Edith, are the short – simple annals of the poor!’ The full context in Gray puts James among the honest rustics: Let not ambition mock their useful toil,   Their homely joys, and destiny obscure; Nor grandeur hear with a disdainful smile   The short and simple annals of the poor. Here again, as with the ‘compromised ...”

“... and was hired on arrival by the patron of the Los Angeles Times, Colonel (later General) Harrison Gray Otis. Lummis helped to forge the booster image described by Kevin Starr in his book Inventing the dream: ‘a mélange of mission myth (originating in Helen Hunt Jackson’s Ramona), obsession with climate, political conservatism (symbolised in the open ...”

“... horseshoe-shaped toilet seats. Howie’s non-narrative is interrupted by numerous footnotes, a ‘gray silt of further example and qualification’ which recalls the works of his heroes Boswell, Gibbon and Lecky. Like an Arden Shakespeare, these marginalia often crowd out the main text: rather as Howie describes the topsy-turvy working of memory, ‘what was ...”

“... described by Sargent in his letter to James as ‘the unique extra-human’. That would be Count Robert de Montesquiou-Fézensac. This scion of the nobility (he was descended from d’Artagnan) is familiar to many of us who might not know his name, because he was the inspiration for more major fictional characters than any one person could ever aspire to ...”

“... called ‘the greatest art director that films have ever known’; the Polish composer Allan Gray (whose real name was Józef Żmigrod); the German art director Hein Heckroth; and the French and German cinematographers Georges Périnal and Erwin Hillier. The company also had the financial backing of J. Arthur Rank, a wealthy Methodist industrialist from ...”

“... into the gay fraternity, partly on the fictional evidence of John Barth’s Sot Weed Factor; Gray is ‘clearly homosexual’; Akenside is ‘exclusively homosexual’; and Handel is declared ‘more homosocial than the norm for the age’. As Rousseau extends his list to include Burke, Smollett, Cleland and Horace Walpole, his real target becomes ...”

“... at the church across the square and she overheard them at a nearby table fumbling for a line of Robert Browning’s ‘The Lost Mistress’:Tomorrow we meet the same then, dearest?May I take your hand in mine?Mere friends are we – well, friends the merestKeep much that I resign …Yet I will but say what mere friends say,Or only a thought stronger;I will ...”

“... The Gregory clause was ‘a charter for land clearance and consolidation’, according to Peter Gray. ‘The substantial rise in evictions after 1847 was attributed largely to its introduction,’ according to Christine Kinealy. For the tenants whose potato crop had failed and whose families were starving, the Gregory clause was a nightmare. As a rule, not ...”