“... solemnly intones, ‘does not dishonour a man.’Die Thräne für Weib und KinderEntehret keinen Mann!Lebet wohl! Jetzt gilt es zu sterbenFür die Freiheit mit Blute zu werbenIhr Jäger wohlauf! schlagt an!The tear for his wife and childrenDo not dishonour a man!Farewell, the time has come to die,To pay in blood for liberty.Riflemen, shoot straight if you ...”

“... tall, graceful buildings contain e.e. cummings, Marianne Moore, Ezra Pound, Wallace Stevens and William Carlos Williams.Eliot cast the longest shadow on the mid-century generation, not simply because of the brilliance of the poetry and essays: he was both the model and the anti-model for the New Criticism (espoused by Lowell and Jarrell’s teachers John ...”

“... of a physical crisis (appendicitis), which came on at the launch party for a friend’s novel – William Styron’s The Confessions of Nat Turner – were interpreted as somatic manifestations of envy. But although there were gaps in his treatment, he went on seeing Kleinschmidt for five years. Then, in 1967, he discovered that Kleinschmidt had used material ...”

“... of the worst thing you could do’. And here is Hardwick at the public library discovering Thomas Mann, whose Death in Venice has been mis-shelved in the murder mystery section. (A lesser woman would have put it back.) In 1934, she went to the University of Kentucky, where she sought out ‘the literary people and the political people’. ‘I have a memory ...”

“... highly recommended. From Paris, it was on to New York. Meeting Partisan Review’s co-editor William Phillips at a party, Sontag, now a single mother living on a shoestring, got right to business: ‘How do you write a review for Partisan Review?’ ‘You ask,’ Phillips replied. ‘I’m asking,’ she said, and, open sesame, she was in. The ...”

“... also means ‘hat’, and most of the characters wear fedoras, as if they’ve wandered in from a William Wyler or John Huston film. The sets, too, ‘bear witness to my passion for the American cinema’, Melville said. The phone booth in the métro is an American one; the bar resembles a coffee shop in Manhattan; the police interrogation room, with its ...”

“... story of Mrs Heidegger turning a visitor away from the door with the excuse: ‘Jetzt denkt mein Mann.’ ‘My husband is thinking now.’) Clearly, their lives together weren’t easy. She married a wounded man desperate to purge himself of his trauma; he needed to talk; she listened; she got him through it all. Then came almost thirty years in which he ...”

“... that way. After all, Larkin the librarian –No, I don’t think one can.Or Eliot the publisher. William Shakespeare engaged very successfully with the workaday world.Of course.As for your ‘Lives of the Poets’, which you’ve just finished, can you tell me which of the poets are in it?Well, they’re pretty much the ones you’d expect. They are all dead ...”