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“... Harvard and the academic life probably awaiting him: he urged him instead to marry Vivienne Haigh-Wood, despite her skittishness and troubling nerves, and stay in London to write poetry. Il miglior fabbro’s own renunciation of academia had occurred seven years previously, in 1908, in the course of his second semester at Wabash, and also involved an English ...”

“... 60th birthday in 1948 contained much pleasant anecdote, and there were respectful reminiscences in Allen Tate’s memorial volume of 1966. Meanwhile, off the page, there was some gossip about such matters as a putatively vast pornographic poem, and about Eliot’s first marriage. I once heard J.B. Priestley explaining that the Eumenides in The Family Reunion ...”

“... set and Godard tore up the script, beginning again with Burgess Meredith and Molly Ringwald. Woody Allen did a walk-on as Mr Alien and Godard himself appeared as Professor Pluggy. Mailer’s vision of the film as a gangster movie in the tradition of The Godfather was systematically thrown to the winds. 7. Stabilisation. In the most recent phase of his ...”

“... strong, warm and macerated in phlegm. He had the genial, tannin glaze of a resting Stone: Ronnie Wood morphing into Bill Wyman. A heavy silver wedding ring. The ever-present mobile phone. I’d given Mr Nice a first reading. And that’s how Marks presented himself. How he charmed the uncharmable, the warders at Terre Haute Penitentiary: his ‘usual trick ...”

“... charging three times the amount he suggests here). Enter R. Frost, poet for all occasions – whom Allen Ginsberg would describe as ‘the original entrepreneur of poetry’, the man who would tell Robert Lowell that hell was a half-filled auditorium. The auditoriums were usually full, but one observer noted that ‘even when [Frost] consents to sit on a ...”

“... morning I might revisit an early story like ‘Flight’ (1959), which sees the Updike stand-in Allen Dow referred to by his father as ‘Young America’, and musing that ‘his mother’s genius was to give the people closest to her mythic immensity. I was the phoenix.’ I would see Updike himself bristling gold with fire and feathers, and I would admire ...”

“... profound experience of Clare’s childhood. One morning he went to gather rotten sticks from the wood, then decided ‘to wander about the fields’. He gazed over the yellow furze of Emmonsales Heath, and imagined, he says in his autobiography, ‘that the world’s end was at the edge of the horizon and that a day’s journey was able to find it’. He ...”

“... pedantic squabbles over otherwise forgotten crimes, mouthy justifications scooped onto wood pulp. They can come from either end of the Pergamon Press scale, a ghosted Pamela Anderson or a cryogenic Nicolae Ceausescu. There can even be cod biographies of characters that never existed: Sherlock Holmes, James Bond, Dr Who (the ‘novelised’ version ...”

“... to, I think it derives somewhat from Yeats and from Eliot, and in this country friends of mine, Allen Tate and John Crowe Ransom. And a rather strange position was built up. There were great arguments that poetry was a form of knowledge, at least as valid as scientific knowledge, and in certain ways more so, because it didn’t abstract from experience. We ...”

“... their civility the better to use law and force against the Irish, from Spenser’s long-haired wood kerns through the Fenians to the Hunger Strikers. ‘Heroic Styles’ (1984) proposes, equally provocatively, that Yeats and Joyce contributed to the logjam of the North. Both essays are vigilant, authoritative and tendentious, with Deane jesting about the ...”

“... management do give us more time to suffer the pains and debilities of old age but, as Woody Allen noted, consider the alternative. Still, Porter is on to something important here and the tension between his two narratives – the Exodus narrative of liberation from ignorance and disease, the other its ironic doppelgänger – suffuses his book. The ...”

“... corpses, the story’s climax, how outré in fact the whole thing is. Even in a South African teak wood, not many tramps are killed by lightning-stroke. Killed, moreover, to this degree – to the dehumanising reiteration of the word ‘charcoal’, into which some kind of tragic love-story at last crumbles (‘Both burned to charcoal, you see,’ as Hooper ...”

“... through anxiety and depression. Most mornings, the car that took him from his home in St John’s Wood to the Observer offices near Fleet Street would divert to Sigmund Freud’s old house in Maresfield Gardens, Hampstead, where Freud’s daughter Anna still saw patients. There, Astor would spend a daily analytic hour on the couch attempting to understand his ...”

“... the belt at both Revolucion and Lunes. Before I was an Infante terrible, now I was a babe in the wood. Fidel Castro himself talked to us. Characteristically, he had the last word. Getting rid first of the ever-present Browning 9mm fastened to his belt – making true a metaphor by Goebbels: ‘Every time I hear the word culture, I reach for my ...”

“... is likewise visually transfixing. Later, he would become a popular Bay Area psychic, a friend to Allen Ginsberg and the Beats and the experimental filmmaker James Broughton and a prominent gay political activist.) Despite Arthur’s chronic selfishness, Esther appears to have treated him in a generous if not saintly spirit. He ended up extracting quite of ...”