“... Milton, Johnson, Goethe (Aristocratic Age); Wordsworth, Austen, Whitman, Dickinson, Dickens, George Eliot, Tolstoy, Ibsen (Democratic Age); and Freud, Proust, Joyce, Woolf (Orlando), Kafka, Borges, Neruda and Pessoa, Beckett (Chaotic Age). As you might expect, these essays are opinionated, sometimes contrary, and often very good. On Shakespeare he is ...”

“... half-avoiding and half-resisting the opulence and extensiveness of poets as different as Wallace Stevens and Rainer Maria Rilke; crediting insufficiently the crystalline inwardness of Emily Dickinson, all those forked lightnings and fissures of association; and missing the visionary strangeness of Eliot. And these more or less costive attitudes were ...”

“... by night,’ and more in that vein. Having mentioned, in passing, Scott’s role in orchestrating George IV’s visit to Edinburgh, he went on chattily: ‘About the Royal Visit Professor Johnson has an amusing anecdote to relate’; the anecdote is quoted at length. And then, as so often, just as he seems to be launching into another aspect of his topic, he ...”

“... of slavery’. You would be wrong. On 6 May 1937, the assistant director of the FWP in Washington, George Cronyn, wrote to the FWP director for North Carolina: ‘Mr Lomax and I found the story of Aunt Betty Cofer of great interest and well told. It has a rich human flavour and presents an authentic picture of the period.’ Couch’s plans for white life ...”

“... by case basis, or at least administration by administration. Denouncing ‘terrorists’ under George W. Bush in the 2000s is one thing (though don’t take that as a personal endorsement), but denouncing ‘communists’ under Truman or Eisenhower in the 1950s might seem more dubious to American liberals, not to mention denouncing ‘woke’ intellectuals ...”

“... else will be diffused to the community. Loosely directed by the head of NHS England, Simon Stevens, money, staff and new investment are being directed towards primary care – family doctors, community nurses, souped-up local clinics, systems to help the chronically unwell live at home. In universe two a counter-reality prevails: the reality of ...”

“... royal work, was twenty years in the making, but thought so dreadful that Victoria’s grandson George V had it destroyed (it lives on in various copies and mezzotints). She had laid out her vision for the picture in her journal: ‘the solitude, the sport, and the Highlanders in the water &c. will be, as Landseer says, a beautiful historical ...”

“... with it. Chatterton worked a similar scheme on a breeches-maker of Salisbury named Stevens, and his Rowley texts were all part of a hoax he was perpetrating on various interested Bristolians, in particular the antiquarian Barrett and the literary enthusiast Catcott. Chatterton wanted to get money from his forgeries; he was also energised by his ...”

“... expect me to progress in a straight line … The latest salutation, by the way, is from Wallace Stevens who sent the Partisan Review a letter … saying that my review of The Man with the Blue Guitar was the ‘most invigorating review’ that he had ever had.At other times, his arrogance wasn’t tempered by self-consciousness. He wrote to Pound pointing ...”

“... from Shakespeare’s Sonnet 121 to Emerson’s ‘Experience’ and on into several poems by Stevens. The rhetoric of manhood is inherent in the very traditions of literary production and inspiration and isn’t simply one of literature’s themes. It finds its voice in that magnification by which certain male writers come to believe in their own ...”

“... people found solace and community together. Wheatley and other people of colour, including Zingo Stevens, Bristol Yamma and John Quamine, shared stories of their pasts. Several of the men were members of the Newport Free African Union Society, founded in 1780. Wheatley sustained a long friendship with Obour Tanner, an enslaved woman who lived in Newport and ...”

“... seemed improbable for a future novelist. Persistent rumours that she was not the daughter of George Frederic Jones but the illegitimate offspring of a Scottish peer or an English tutor clearly attest to a sense that there was something otherwise inexplicable about this ambitious daughter of Old New York. Her autobiography, A Backward Glance (1934), says ...”

“... of his book Very Little … Almost Nothing (1997), a study of Blanchot, Beckett and Wallace Stevens: Events circled around my father’s illness with lung cancer which resulted in his death a couple of days after Christmas 1994 … Very Little … Almost Nothing is thus an act of mourning. It is dedicated to my father, and my memory of his death’s ...”

“... Deleuze on Kafka, Gérard Genette on Flaubert, Hélène Cixous on Joyce, Harold Bloom on Wallace Stevens, J. Hillis Miller on Henry James. Some theorists are slapdash readers, but so are some non-theoretical critics. Derrida is so perversely myopic a reader, doggedly pursuing the finest flickers of meaning across a page, that he exasperates some of his ...”

“... hear that the line ‘Free me, Lord, from evil folk’ (140) is best spoken in the voice of George Bush. Inversion, the possessive, the unpronounceable and an unfortunate word-choice all converge in Psalm 18, where he transforms a dull line in the King James (‘As soon as they hear of me, they shall obey me: the strangers shall submit themselves unto ...”