“... into the Beatnik era, establishing important transatlantic connections with Robert Creeley, Jonathan Williams, Lorine Niedecker and others. The break-up of his first marriage in 1964 terminated this period of relative stability, initiating the chapter of uncertainty that coincided with his first letters to Stephen Bann. At no stage in Finlay’s ...”

“... with the purest of intentions. ‘It was not so much the hatred she was interested in as the swift attenuation, as if their collective blood had made a decision.’ This is the world she participates in creating:It was a place where she knew what was going to happen, it was a place where she would always choose the right side, where the failure was in ...”

“... It is not so much the chronicle of an illness as the record of one or two lives: ‘He was a swift worker; no one else could set as many ens per hour as he could.’ The couple have a son, Aaron, who was born from Erna’s ‘only union with Eugene, which took place at the end of the week of mourning’ Eugene’s mother’s death. ‘Union’ had not ...”

“... in whom SF riffs are completely subsumed in metaphor. Elsewhere, Lem Two seems to glance back to Swift, Voltaire and Gogol, or sideways to Borges and Pynchon. These are names the SF tradition has often used to decorate its wrong-side-of-the-tracks clubhouse. Yet those writers would be bewildered at the clannish rituals and arcane litmus tests typical of the ...”

“... the other hand, the event was so crass that one wondered if it had not been entirely imagined by Jonathan Swift or Paul Durcan, whose poem ‘What Shall I Wear, Darling, to the Great Hunger?’ is included in Tom Hayden’s book Irish Hunger.During the week before the Bank Holiday concert, John Waters wrote:This weekend, courtesy of the Minister [Avril ...”

“... least, on Lowell, Auden, Plath, Heaney, Ashbery and many more. He made his name as a specialist on Swift, where his monumental biography, completed in 1983, has told us more than any previous source about the man, his works and the age, to draw on a subtitle Victorian in its confident amplitude. His most lasting book may yet prove to be Literary Meaning and ...”

“... story to save my life.’ By this point she had published four collections of short stories with Jonathan Cape. In a review of her first book, Frost in April (1929), Vita Sackville-West called her a ‘born writer’ and praised her stories as ‘economical, unsentimental and absolutely convincing’. She also compared her to Katherine Mansfield, while ...”

“... enclosure, reprinted in Healy’s collection, one of Marvell’s most interesting recent critics, Jonathan Crewe, shows how ‘The Garden’ exposes ‘a widespread cultural fantasy of the supposedly autonomous, originary masculine subject’. This, though Crewe does not say so, is because Marvell’s irony uses a form of camp to unsettle conventional ...”

“... of US fiction writers around his age that includes the late David Foster Wallace, George Saunders, Jonathan Franzen and Jeffrey Eugenides. There are a few things that set Antrim apart: he’s Southern; his strongest affinity to a writer in the previous generation is to Donald Barthelme, not Don DeLillo; he’s the least likely to be topical, to dramatise a few ...”

“... and Mack so reticent about the ‘frequently homoerotic correspondence’ between Pope and Swift? What of Gay, ‘who never married and whose psychological attachment to the older, if occasionally paternal, Pope merits more attention than it has received?’ Not for the first time Rousseau’s enthusiasm gets the better of his facts here: Gay was ...”

“... sound-bites from a phantom Smith Square manifesto. Two coppers can’t sit down for a swift half without debating the morality of capital punishment. (‘I happen to believe that the death penalty does deter, so what I’m saying is that I’m willing for innocent people to take a greater chance of being murdered so that I can salve my conscience ...”

“... process of an immense worm.’ In Bomber County: The Poetry of a Lost Pilot’s War, Daniel Swift writes about the strangeness of Jarrell’s war: ‘No one was ever so far from the war as Randall Jarrell, deep in Texas.’ He started training as a pilot. ‘Flying is pretty dull,’ he wrote to Edmund Wilson, ‘and I’m bad at it.’ At the beginning ...”

“... that all interpretation is necessarily misinterpretation (reduced by calmer exponents such as Jonathan Culler to the uncontentious assertion that no interpretation can ever be final), and the dashing new formulation of the old problem of intention – Ellis argues with force and clarity. Moreover he happens to believe that some writings are more complex ...”

“... death. One Scotsman’s effects, listed at Calcutta, included the works of Shakespeare, Milton and Swift, a backgammon table, a hookah, four empty cases of gin and two Malay slave-girls: an epitome of Scotland overseas, outcome of a jumbled, contradictory evolution of Scotland at home. North America yields a crop of intriguing topics, from tobacco cultivation ...”

“... future’ that otherwise awaited him, one in which he never leaves Ohio or tells off Taylor Swift. She made him do his homework and kept him away from the local kids who smoked marijuana, threatening that ‘if she saw me in the presence of any person on the banned list, she would run him over with her car.’ He believed that she would do it: as a ...”