“... read so much of it. The young Keats read Mary Tighe’s verses with pleasure, and the Misses Porter, of Romance fame, admired his ‘Endymion’. Barnard is right to emphasise just how important the market for poetry was, which was why Taylor and Hessey, the young firm which took over Keats’s Poems of 1817 from Charles Ollier, were prepared to treat ...”

“... Dowland and Thomas Campion.’ (She might have looked sideways to Noël Coward, Bob Dylan or Cole Porter; to John Cage’s poetry, Ezra Pound’s operas, the compositions of Christopher Fry or Anthony Burgess.) One of the aims of her study is to rescue Gurney’s later work from accusations of madness, and offer it as evidence of his experimental, even ...”

“... when he accused a respected ‘Indian’ officer, Captain John Reynolds, of ordering a bottle of porter at the mess table of the 11th, where only champagne was allowed. Reynolds protested that he had in fact ordered Moselle, which came in a similar black bottle. Cardigan refused to accept this as an excuse, since gentlemen had their wine decanted. There was ...”

“... Farson, in The Gilded Gutter Life of Francis Bacon (also 1993), gives it a passing reference. Michael Peppiatt, in Francis Bacon: Anatomy of an Enigma (2008), gives the year of Bacon’s departure for the cottage as 1942, adding: ‘The enforced idleness, free of wartime anxieties and the distractions of London, served as a catalyst to his real ...”

“... directly or obliquely, in novels like William Styron’s Sophie’s Choice, films like The Night Porter, and in the writings of Hannah Arendt, George Steiner, Bruno Bettelheim and a host of others. But on the subject of the nuclear holocaust there is a deafening silence. It is as if, somehow, the entire topic had been declared out of bounds, as if it were ...”

“... for Jones’s corpse to be preserved in alcohol and placed in a lead coffin. When General Horace Porter, the US ambassador to France, went looking for it a century later, the only evidence of Jones’s interment was from an article published in Correspondance littéraire in 1859. Despite the refusal of Congress to finance the project, by 1905 the site of the ...”

“... therefore became, so to speak, theatrical squared. Their situation also made them competitive. As Michael Young was to point out in The Rise of the Meritocracy, élites based on education lack the security of the old aristocracies of land and money. To live by one’s wits is a nervous business: every younger brain, each new foot on the educational ladder, is ...”

“... naff’ (Irish Independent, 8 October 2018).Tories, historical sensitivities of: Michael Gove once characterised the peace process as a capitulation to the IRA, and then likened it to the appeasement of the Nazis. In June, Boris Johnson said concerns over the Irish border were ‘pure millennium bug stuff’. In August, Jacob Rees-Mogg ...”

“... Perhaps the real test of an anthology is whether it convincingly brings fresh material forward. Michael Harper, Dave Smith, Albert Goldbarth: Vendler takes risks at the Contemporary end of her Book, and mostly carries them off. Though one looks in vain for Hass or Dulpen, there is much to please, including a clutch of decorously unfeminist women. Louise ...”

“... makes it to Milan, a little boy runs out and fetches him a bottle of grappa. ‘I sent for the porter and when he came I told him in Italian to get me a bottle of Cinzano at the wine shop, a fiasco of chianti and the evening papers.’ Once he’s up and ready to start courting Catherine Barkley in the style she deserves, they’re off to their favourite ...”

“... memory of Plath – an argument that certainly pushes to a new level of sophistication the Cole Porter lyric ‘I’m always true to you darling in my fashion’ – it’s hard not to feel that Hughes never escaped the baffling labyrinth into which his relationship with Plath led him. It is to the doomed Minotaur rather than the heroic Theseus that he ...”

“... of doom creeping towards them. In his essay on Tolstoy’s image during the Russian revolution, Michael Denner points out that in 1917 – seven years after he died – the New York Times blamed Tolstoy’s pacifism for the collapse of the Russian front in Galicia. Nobody knew who the Bolsheviks were; everyone knew Tolstoy. Many foreign commentators ...”

“... Here is the customised red convertible Cadillac Eldorado that belonged to Chuck Berry; here too is Michael Jackson’s fedora, Lightnin’ Hopkins’s guitar, Louis Armstrong’s trumpet. There is a large temporary exhibition about Oprah Winfrey. ‘She has a place in the museum with a long line of women who did extraordinary things in their time – Harriet ...”

“... forgetting the medium – that ‘it’s a privilege to watch.’ ‘Thank you, Ocean Vuong,’ Michael Cunningham chimes, ‘for this brilliant and remarkable first novel.’ Ben Lerner goes big: ‘Vuong … expands our sense of what literature can make visible, thinkable, felt across borders and generations and genres.’ He must have thought this would ...”

“... more Republican or more dispassionately liberal. But he is wary of the charge (reiterated by Peter Porter in his sharp Sunday Telegraph review of Opened Ground) of ‘fetishising ... the local’, and cautious about the indigenous traditions of Irish nationalism, given the evidence that ‘pride in the ethnic and religious heritage can quickly degrade into the ...”