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“... while still an undergraduate at Columbia, where Mark Van Doren was his teacher and mentor; and Robert Penn Warren was the editor (at Southern Review) whom he first sought to impress. But if the New Critical aesthetic disciplined Berryman it also inhibited him. It gave him a good technical training, but its insistence on what he later called ‘Eliot’s ...”

“... in the country’s burgeoning university system. Of the great modernists of the previous era, only Robert Frost assumed the role of pedagogue to undergraduates, taking his first job at Amherst College in 1917. Pound, Eliot, Wallace Stevens, William Carlos Williams, Marianne Moore, Hart Crane all lived by other means; though ...”

“... at some peril. The dominance Neale held for so long can be seen in the publisher’s claim that Wallace MacCaffrey’s new biography is ‘the first by a professional historian for nearly sixty years’. This is unfair: the late Joel Hurstfield and Christopher Haigh would have cause for complaint that their books, Elizabeth I and the Unity of England ...”

“... that remains for them afterwards is life working in an insurance company’ – when Glover meets Wallace Stevens in the hereafter, I should love to be a fly on the celestial wall. The book is not, and does not claim to be, a substantive contribution to the academic discussion of ethical principles, but it is a book that will offer a wide readership a very ...”

“... assistant curator at New York’s Museum of Modern Art when Jackson Pollock, Willem de Kooning and Robert Rauschenberg were making Action Painting famous; and he and John Ashbery, his friend and contemporary, must have felt their poetry belonged in tandem with that school. O’Hara’s ‘Why I am not a painter’ doesn’t tell us why he is not a painter, but ...”

“... For example: Jean Renoir, Orson Welles, James Wong Howe, Dudley Nichols, Clifford Odets, Robert Rossen, John Garfield, Charlie Chaplin and Leo McCarey all attended a reception in July 1943 for the Soviet director and administrator Mikhail Kalatozov. At that time Russian and American propaganda methods dovetailed nicely, and everyone seemed to approve ...”

“... the process by avoiding paraphrasable meaning altogether. One need only point to the work of Wallace Stevens or John Ashbery to show how successfully some of it sustains our expectations while ultimately refusing to deliver the semantic goods. Having extracted a poem’s point, runs the usual defence of such teasing evasions, readers will have no further ...”

“... obliquely related, spanning almost forty years: on Basil Bunting, Charles Tomlinson, Ted Hughes, Robert Graves, Hugh MacDiarmid, J.M. Synge, David Jones, George Steiner, Geoffrey Hill, Elizabeth Daryush and the fraternity of poets anthologised by Andrew Crozier and Tim Longville in A Various Art. It also includes a number of Davie’s poems. If we were to ...”

“... out Nixon’s order to fire Cox; Richardson’s deputy, William Ruckelshaus, followed. Eventually Robert Bork, the solicitor-general and next in the chain of command at Justice, sacked Cox. Ziegler announced the abolition of the special prosecutor’s office. But the public outcry at the ‘Saturday Night Massacre’ was so great that Nixon was forced to ...”

“... recipients are now well trained. Which is why America’s Kingdom comes as a pleasant surprise. Robert Vitalis, who teaches political science at the University of Pennsylvania, has produced a scholarly and readable book on the interaction between Saudi society and Aramco, the US oil giant that had its beginnings when the Saudi government granted its first ...”

“... in the early 1960s, she nonetheless continued picking up nubile girls with aplomb, including (says Robert Schanke) a ‘tubercular young British actress who was a waitress in a coffee shop’. Once one might have welcomed such a seduction, fang marks, TB and all. I remember much relishing de Acosta’s gossipy 1960 autobiography, Here Lies the Heart, when it ...”

“... she’s a ‘very hot woman’, his revulsion over the martyred sanctification of David Foster Wallace (‘the most tedious, overrated, tortured, pretentious writer of my generation’), and his slating of the Best Picture winner Moonlight as a ‘victim narrative’ capturing Hollywood’s sympathy vote. Ellis’s oft-expressed irritation with the clammy ...”

“... and academics. The latest is a handsome edition, complete with the requisite red ribbon, by Robert Alter, and it has arrived accompanied by a joyful noise, widely acclaimed in the press as the Psalms for Our Time. New translations of a classic text are either done as a criticism of the old translations (correcting mistakes, finding an equivalent that is ...”

“... Jean Toomer, Countee Cullen, Sterling Brown, Gwendolyn Bennett, Zora Neale Hurston, Nella Larsen, Wallace Thurman and Rudolph Fisher. ‘The array of personalities in the literary area is startling,’ one of them wrote. ‘Few were born in New York, although we speak of the Harlem Renaissance. Claude McKay, one of the movement’s ornaments, was born in ...”

“... socialist response at home. We already have pointers. Malcolm Kottler in his essay shows that even Wallace (who studied in Mechanics Institutes and socialist Halls of Science), supposedly at one with Darwin on natural selection, in fact preferred a group (rather than individual) selection theory. Just how widespread this kind of preference was on the left is ...”