“... would have enjoyed the different ways contemporary writers climb over or slither round him. David Foster Wallace claimed ‘The Balloon’ made him want to be a writer; Miranda July keeps Flying to America on her bedside table; Jenny Offill returns regularly to ‘Not-Knowing’; and George Saunders has filled the ...”

“... of which he judges ‘the most underrated’ Joan Rees’s and ‘the most overrated that by David Cecil’. After this apparent jettisoning of pusillanimity, readers are in for a shock when they turn to the notes which, with divisions to indicate roughly which section of the text they refer to, are clumped in read-straight-on format at the end of the ...”

“... reminds us of this. Besides, ‘the absence of the imagination had/ Itself to be imagined,’ as Wallace Stevens has it in ‘The Plain Sense of Things’. One must first be rich to be newly poor. Does any poet, really, have a healthy disrespect for language without also having a healthy respect? The introduction, which reads like a post-structuralist’s ...”

“... with work by several artists, including Willem de Kooning and Jim Dine, as well as a selection of Wallace Stevens with a frontispiece by Jasper Johns; 1992 saw an edition of Kaddish, White Shroud and Black Shroud with lithograph portraits by Kitaj. Diebenkorn’s Yeats, which came out between the Stevens and the Ginsberg, contained six of the artist’s ...”

“... in its own right. The chief offender on this count in both Words Alone and Adam’s Curse is Wallace Stevens, his distrust of whom is one thing at least he had in common with Donald Davie. Donoghue fairly wipes the floor with Stevens as a reader of Eliot. Most critics have agreed that ‘X’ in ‘Extracts from Addresses to the Academy of Fine ...”

“... northern towns.I met Morris in the serviced flat rented for him in another modern block by Wallace Estates, which owns the freehold of Skyline Chambers. The plain low-ceilinged rooms are decorated with paintings he took from his flat, along with a metre-long model of the Titanic, a childhood obsession, but most of his belongings are still in ...”

“... for times when the batteries have run down’. The surprise is that instead of lecturing on Wallace Stevens, William Carlos Williams, W.H. Auden, Elizabeth Bishop, Gertrude Stein and Marianne Moore, all of whom he acknowledges as ‘major influences’, he discusses an eclectic group of 19th and 20th-century poets who for the most part have endured long ...”

“... but himself. If he is in earnest – and if he isn’t we’ll not bother with him, any more than David Trotter does – he thought that he was testing his society by moving out to the periphery of that society, speaking for and with the disaffected, the vagabonds, the ill-adjusted. How disconcerting, then, to find that the disaffection he thought he was ...”

“... different, are unimaginable without Pound, early Eliot, William Carlos Williams and perhaps Wallace Stevens as forerunners. This is the main stream of modern American poetry. In England the picture is very different. Pound is grudgingly acknowledged, distrusted, kept at a distance. Eliot holds his place, but not the revolutionary Eliot. Eliot didn’t ...”

“... for Hubert Humphrey, even as the rest of the State was presenting third-party candidate George Wallace with one of his more unsettling victories. To be sure, even then the Cuban-American population in Miami was enormous, but it was, as yet, politically unfocused. Many Cubans who would later launch themselves into Florida politics still believed that it was ...”

“... might pass as an intellectual.The extravagant praise these men inspire can be a little creepy. David Foster Wallace described watching Federer as a ‘near-religious experience’, but even he couldn’t have anticipated the levels of idolatry in The Roger Federer Effect. The book brings together interviews with ...”

“... well as their heirs, such as T. Coraghessan Boyle, Lydia Davis, Rick Moody, William Vollmann and David Foster Wallace. None of these writers – however popular or influential, however frequently their writing appeared in the Paris Review or Conjunctions or the year-end Best American and Pushcart anthologies – managed to ...”

“... the corridors of power and the demi-monde of poets’ pubs. Like the Eliot he admires and the Wallace Stevens he deplores, you wouldn’t think he was a poet, to look at him: ‘When I am deposited at my desk I become, as nearly as may be, purely functional.’ But his office is in St James’s Square, and a seductive symbol can be seen from the ...”

“... of Windsor, as soundproof as the walls of all those castles they processed around. Who knew of David Windsor’s dereliction of duty in favour of love (or whatever it was) until a week before the Abdication? Well, quite a lot of people actually, but not the readers of the popular (as in lower orders) press. Marion Crawford, governess to Lilibet and ...”

“... I posted a photograph of it on Twitter and in less than an hour received a message from Craig Wallace, curator of the Sogo Arts Gallery and an experienced model maker. Soon he had the Bonhomme Richard in his care. The first step, he said, would be to clean it with water and a small paintbrush. Then he’d treat the wood with linseed oil. He started ...”