“... for not being commented on – there’s no weary acknowledgment of her parents’ love of Edgar Allen Poe. The arbitrarily invoked Gothic strain is taken fairly far: ‘Sometimes in the night she would call out this name, her own, “Lenore!” in a strong urgent voice, and Helen in her own room would shudder and cry a little.’ Then there are heightened ...”

“... or worse? Interesting as these questions are, if you focus on them too narrowly you can miss the wood for the trees. Some of Donne’s best religious poems have nothing to do with inter or intra-confessional controversy or division. ‘If Poisonous Minerals’ points out how strange it is that Christianity’s threat of eternal torture applies only to ...”

“... houses in Kipton Orchard, terraced houses where airmen and their families lived in Kipton Wood. The promised gym, swimming pool and church never materialised, and there’s no school or doctor’s surgery, but residents say things have got better since the bank called in its loan to the developer and took on the responsibility of refurbishing homes ...”

“... Harvard and the academic life probably awaiting him: he urged him instead to marry Vivienne Haigh-Wood, despite her skittishness and troubling nerves, and stay in London to write poetry. Il miglior fabbro’s own renunciation of academia had occurred seven years previously, in 1908, in the course of his second semester at Wabash, and also involved an English ...”

“... were a family of puzzlers. Father and sons amused themselves by constructing polyhedra out of wood and cardboard that could be taken apart and put together in interesting ways. Everyone played chess: Lionel set puzzles and his wife, Margaret, like him a qualified physician, was a keen player; Oliver Penrose, Roger’s older brother, is a physicist and a ...”

“... very good indeed. In The Kodak Mantra Diaries, Sinclair’s record of a film project based on Allen Ginsberg’s stay in London thirty years ago, there is an interesting exchange with the psychiatrist David Cooper. Sinclair: It seems to me that what has emerged from this Congress [the Dialectics of Liberation] is the necessity for what has been described ...”

“... set and Godard tore up the script, beginning again with Burgess Meredith and Molly Ringwald. Woody Allen did a walk-on as Mr Alien and Godard himself appeared as Professor Pluggy. Mailer’s vision of the film as a gangster movie in the tradition of The Godfather was systematically thrown to the winds. 7. Stabilisation. In the most recent phase of his ...”

“... 60th birthday in 1948 contained much pleasant anecdote, and there were respectful reminiscences in Allen Tate’s memorial volume of 1966. Meanwhile, off the page, there was some gossip about such matters as a putatively vast pornographic poem, and about Eliot’s first marriage. I once heard J.B. Priestley explaining that the Eumenides in The Family Reunion ...”

“... strong, warm and macerated in phlegm. He had the genial, tannin glaze of a resting Stone: Ronnie Wood morphing into Bill Wyman. A heavy silver wedding ring. The ever-present mobile phone. I’d given Mr Nice a first reading. And that’s how Marks presented himself. How he charmed the uncharmable, the warders at Terre Haute Penitentiary: his ‘usual trick ...”

“... charging three times the amount he suggests here). Enter R. Frost, poet for all occasions – whom Allen Ginsberg would describe as ‘the original entrepreneur of poetry’, the man who would tell Robert Lowell that hell was a half-filled auditorium. The auditoriums were usually full, but one observer noted that ‘even when [Frost] consents to sit on a ...”

“... pedantic squabbles over otherwise forgotten crimes, mouthy justifications scooped onto wood pulp. They can come from either end of the Pergamon Press scale, a ghosted Pamela Anderson or a cryogenic Nicolae Ceausescu. There can even be cod biographies of characters that never existed: Sherlock Holmes, James Bond, Dr Who (the ‘novelised’ version ...”

“... profound experience of Clare’s childhood. One morning he went to gather rotten sticks from the wood, then decided ‘to wander about the fields’. He gazed over the yellow furze of Emmonsales Heath, and imagined, he says in his autobiography, ‘that the world’s end was at the edge of the horizon and that a day’s journey was able to find it’. He ...”

“... morning I might revisit an early story like ‘Flight’ (1959), which sees the Updike stand-in Allen Dow referred to by his father as ‘Young America’, and musing that ‘his mother’s genius was to give the people closest to her mythic immensity. I was the phoenix.’ I would see Updike himself bristling gold with fire and feathers, and I would admire ...”

“... their civility the better to use law and force against the Irish, from Spenser’s long-haired wood kerns through the Fenians to the Hunger Strikers. ‘Heroic Styles’ (1984) proposes, equally provocatively, that Yeats and Joyce contributed to the logjam of the North. Both essays are vigilant, authoritative and tendentious, with Deane jesting about the ...”

“... to, I think it derives somewhat from Yeats and from Eliot, and in this country friends of mine, Allen Tate and John Crowe Ransom. And a rather strange position was built up. There were great arguments that poetry was a form of knowledge, at least as valid as scientific knowledge, and in certain ways more so, because it didn’t abstract from experience. We ...”