“... galleries, gay bars and ratty theatres discovering new thresholds, ‘new anatomies’ (to use Hart Crane’s phrase) that were beyond the ken and compass of the uptown commissariat. Moreover, Sontag was an ardent, ravenous cinephile, a haunter of double feature repertory houses, Times Square fleapits and museum film programmes. ‘The last of the great ...”

“... on the overthrow of the Iranian government in 1953, carried out in the interests of BP. In 2000, James Risen of the New York Times explained: When the Central Intelligence Agency helped overthrow Muhammad Mossadegh as Iran’s prime minister in 1953, ensuring another 25 years of rule for Shah Muhammad Reza Pahlavi, the CIA was already figuring that its ...”

“... between Prufrock’s ‘overwhelming question’ (line 10) and the observation in Chapter 23 of James Fenimore Cooper’s The Pioneers that ‘The whole company were a good deal astounded with this overwhelming question’? Certainly Eliot’s mind was a vast, labyrinthine echo chamber, and perhaps more than any other canonical poet of the English ...”

“... long and was roughed up by jocks. Charles moved to New York to study under the Regionalist Thomas Hart Benton at the Art Students’ League. He became one of Benton’s favourite students and an intimate of the Benton family. On a trip hack to California he persuaded Jackson, at a loose end, to come to New York and study at the League. Jackson, too, fell ...”

“... a quizzical, even sceptical light on the titanic efforts of an American Modernist poet such as Hart Crane to impose on American history an overarching, all-comprehending myth or narrative: the sheer multiplicity of its characters and their stories defeats all impulses and attempts to generalise. Reznikoff was active in left-wing circles, and clearly ...”

“... in the equally massive Complete Letters, edited by Wilde’s grandson, Merlin Holland, and Rupert Hart-Davis. Rowland has a whole chapter on the relations between Willie and Oscar, ‘Wilde about the boy’, which he begins with a warning: ‘It must be emphasised from the outset that, in the absence of information of a more tangible kind, what follows in the ...”

“... her, it seems, without a biddyish dilation on the carnality of her themes. ‘Maude Hutchins,’ James Kelly wrote in 1955, does ‘as she pleases’ as a novelist and ‘to date what has pleased her most is s-e-x as observed and enjoyed from the feminine vantage point.’ Hutchins, Maxwell Geismar said, was a writer who went about ‘describing casually all ...”

“... required a network of fly-by-night independent bookshops. Dorn was comfortable in this world. Mike Hart, or one of the others from the communal Camden Town operation, would be on the phone to let customers know that the latest volume of Gunslinger had arrived. It really was as tight as that, 18th century in a way Dorn would have appreciated. That was his ...”

“... Tite Street was the family home; he did not return there. The spectre of Wilde haunted Henry James in the first two months of 1895, and James’s correspondence gives us a much richer sense than Wilde’s does of what the opening of a new play could mean at the turn of the 19th century. ‘Who shall deny the immense ...”

“... James Schuyler​ gave his first public reading on 15 November 1988. People queued around the block to get a seat, and at the end he received the longest, most unconsciously glad applause Eileen Myles had ever heard in New York. ‘As for my moment in the spotlight,’ Schuyler reported to a friend a couple of days later, ‘well, truth to tell, I was a fucking sensation ...”

“... of the editors at Partisan Review, who began publishing her criticism: Richard Wright, Faulkner, Hart Crane, the Goncourts – Hardwick could turn her hand to almost anything. When Philip Rahv met her, he was struck by her gumption. He asked her what she thought of Diana Trilling: ‘Not much.’ ‘I weighed about ten pounds then,’ Hardwick ...”

“... the last to be born are, soberingly, Stephen Adrian Lawrence (1974-93, ‘murder victim’) and James Patrick Bulger (1990-93, ‘murder victim’). And so ends the 20th century. Turning from subjects to contributors, the roll-call is undeniably impressive; surely no other project could come near to matching the success of the ODNB in commanding the labour ...”

“...  Henry James​’s novel The Princess Casamassima, which dramatises the world of stray revolutionaries in London in the 1880s, depends on energy coming from opposites. The novel’s protagonist, Hyacinth Robinson, appreciates beauty and feels excluded from the world of privilege around him. He lives an interior life ...”

“... of the period was a ‘sad augur’, or whether the ‘balmy time’ refers to the coronation of James I. But the very best editors know that these are in themselves the wrong questions. ‘My love looks fresh’ because ‘my love’ is neither a person nor a feeling, neither a he nor a she, nor even a passion of loyalty. The acute realities of the poem are ...”

“... and I have to go and have an “intimate” lunch with Ivar Ivask.’) In 1973 she wrote to James Merrill: ‘I could weep myself to think of Mr [Chester] Kallman’s weeping over “The Moose”.’ There is no explanation as to how she learned that Kallman had wept over her poem, which is about seeing a moose during a bus journey. The first reference ...”