“... the parentheses that never close, the borrowed cosmologies and hermetic speculations of a young writer who seems to have heeded Jack Spicer’s advice and read the weirdest stuff on which he could lay hands. There were no job offers from Chatto or Faber for this particular poet, but in the Sixties at least there were casual openings in the East London ...”

“... and simply has the corpses pecked by ‘crows and shrikes’. Jean Calais – a pseudonym for Stephen Rodefer – is Villon’s most interesting ‘translator’. Running casually between version and imitation, Rodefer makes every tactical misprision that it’s possible to make. The result feels faithful in the broadest sense. Where, at the end of ...”

“... 15, 1999. Greatly missed, you touched my life and I will never forget. Peace perfect peace. – Stephen King, Ulster Unionist Party. I’m in Belfast also because I’m dropping Michael at the airport – he’s flying back to England to get his A-level results on 19 August. I reflect that the big cultural divide in British society between state and ...”

“... influences was regularly exposed as untenable. Marlowe’s Edward II, for example, shows how the Young Mortimer – who in the name of the ancient constitution rids Edward’s court of Piers Gaveston and then of his pampered successors, the Spencers – inevitably goes on to rid it of the king too. (Once made protector, however, Mortimer abuses the same ...”

“... Gabriel Atkin, Ivor Novello, Noël Coward, Rex Whistler and above all the unbearable Stephen Tennant with his pearls and tantrums – but these tortuous episodes, in which Sassoon often gave as much hell as he got, are greatly revealing of his dissatisfaction as well as evocative of the period.Wilson quotes freely from Sassoon’s verse, the ...”

“... motorway, which every now and then was cut through by a railway line. On the outskirts of Havana, young Cubans in old American cars played their version of chicken – we sailed past them, some indication of how slow and worn out the cars were. At the Meliá Cohiba, there were fresh instructions: be ready to go to dinner. The invitation did not extend to ...”

“... Street, which I do regularly, I hardly ever think about Leopold Bloom and the Kilkenny People or Stephen Daedalus and the ghost of Hamlet’s father, even if I decide to walk the route down Kildare Street and past the National Library. I studied in the National Library almost every weekday between 1973 and 1975, and it is easier to wonder who stole my yellow ...”

“... life he had had, what kind of person he was. You lose the pattern, losing a parent when you’re young. I also felt the wish to speak to him or in some way to have a relationship with him. And those poems probably come from an impulse of that sort, from the delayed pain or loss.Were you close to your siblings, not necessarily as a consequence of this, but ...”

“... imagine her holding a tambourine or with her legs crossed around a bongo drum. ‘The not-so-young among the holy barbarians are not “settling down”, as the nonconformists of the past have done. Some of them are already bringing up families and they are still “beat”,’ Lawrence Lipton writes in The Holy Barbarians, a passage that always comes to ...”

“... the freakishly perverse bankers and investors, she behaves like Orwell in Wigan, like those nice young poets sent north to report back on the dining habits of the natives. To listen on buses and in pubs. Jack London became a disguised tourist in the lower depths for The People of the Abyss in 1902, but Knowles plays smart. She dresses correctly, making the ...”

“... where Bloom is Moses the precursor of Christ, the liberator; Parnell is both Moses and Christ; and Stephen is Christ the Hero. However, Joyce’s idea of the Irish nation is inclusive rather than exclusive – it is a definition beyond tribalism, beyond religious creed. And those Irish historians who congratulate themselves on their freedom from tribal ...”

“... cabinet secret. There is no tomorrow. But Mme de T–– had not expected to tangle with the young chevalier and now her real lover (stalking the shadows of the story) has been cuckolded. Something has changed, and not even Mme de T–– can claim to control the workings of circumstance. It is a libertine truth that you cannot rehearse a ...”

“... huge for a far-right rally in the UK. But the once fringe ideas of Robinson, whose real name is Stephen Yaxley-Lennon, have become mainstream for Reform and the Conservatives, and for populist right-wing movements around the world. The starriest guest at the rally was Robinson’s admirer Elon Musk, who took part by video link. Simion’s presence was ...”

“... beginning his writing career with an account of a hanging in Cotulla for the San Antonio Express. Stephen Crane wandered around with the Chili Queens in the same plaza where the Comanches would ride into town and receive tribute – pay or the town would be burned and looted. This lobby is the setting for a scene from All the Pretty Horses. John Grady Cole ...”

“... of great subtlety were allegedly revealed to Honinbo Jowa by ghosts, enabling him to defeat his young protégé Intetsu Akaboshi, who after four days of continuous play collapsed and coughed up blood, dying of TB shortly afterwards. Another, the Ear Reddening game, turned on a move of such strength that it caused a discernible flow of blood to the ears of ...”