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“... only the wearer but the beholder with pride and patriotism? Questions like these sprout from Scott Hughes Myerly’s earnest foray into military aesthetics. There have been innumerable books about army uniforms and traditions, but Myerly, an American cultural and military historian, is concerned also with the impact on society of military spectacle and of ...”

“... yet, far from stoking rebellion, he writes tenderly of his parents and looks up to Ted Hughes and W.H. Auden. Asked to nominate his Book of the Century last year, he plumped for Waiting for Godot. The idea of Armitage in Beckettian exile, refusing to grant media interviews, is about as plausible as ‘Chaucer at his laptop,/auto-checking his ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... Street Children’s Hospital rather than to the publishers, booksellers, or even the poets. Ted Hughes says, ‘Here is an opportunity to buy a book of poems with a good conscience,’ so if buying poetry usually leaves you racked with guilt, now’s your chance. Contributors include many of the best-known contemporary British poets. Maybe the state should ...”

“... associated with American documentary photography of this period (Gordon Parks’s protest shots, Robert Frank’s The Americans, Diane Arbus’s weirdos), wouldn’t be worth the film it was shot on – but it was different for Roy DeCarava. Hallway (1953) is a photo about nothing except a dark, empty corridor in a Harlem tenement: a quiet image that speaks ...”

“... soon as it appears, and everyone still wants to be a gangster. He is not exactly a tragic hero, as Robert Warshow once suggested in a famous essay, but he is an embodiment of rogue power, a Robin Hood without the sentimental interest in the poor. Actually, gangsters in movies are always giving things away to children and widows, as Jack Nicholson hands out ...”

“... 1962, after she’d torn the phoneline out of the wall during an argument with her husband, Ted Hughes, and he had left her and their two infant children in Devon, there were only letters. ‘I am fine,’ she wrote to her mother in America. ‘Just need a settled nanny & to rest & write & letters. I love & live for letters.’ Letters never seem to arrive ...”

“... be enough. (Kray being the Anglicised form of Krähe, the German for ‘crow’. Tell that to Ted Hughes.) The Bethnal Green labyrinth was still guarded at each of its four corners by pub signs bearing the portraits of birds, but the missing tie had undone all the familial superstitions. Reg was divided from Ron. The chicken-entrail voodoo of the Twins had ...”

“... coherent and tractable. Grief Is the Thing with Feathers, in which a being that resembles Ted Hughes’s Crow appears to a bereaved husband and his sons (the father happens to be writing a critical book about Hughes), qualifies as a novel by the familiar logic of its not fitting any other category. It is rich in hints ...”

“... her close friends had been Assia Wevill, who in 1969 murdered the daughter she had had with Ted Hughes then killed herself. Jannice was also fascinated by the story of the artist Dora Carrington, another suicide. Worried about the situation, Porter accompanied his wife to a psychoanalyst, but the encounter was disastrous. Jannice refused to go back; Porter ...”

“... until it becomes their proper nature. It is the same with writers and artists. Byron or David or Robert Lowell cannot slink off and become their ordinary selves in the intervals of being poets and painters and men of the age. Greta Garbo is always Greta Garbo, once she has found the part. But there is quite a different category of actor, as of ...”

“... O’Neill’s imagination, he saw himself as a novelist, as the latest of his many biographers, Robert Dowling, points out. After a near fatal suicide attempt in 1912 – the episode is chronicled in the recently discovered short play ‘Exorcism’ – he gave up the romance of death for the romance of art. ‘So here’s looking forward to the new ...”

“... is that it has never been quite clear what it was. She began life as Mary Anne Evans, daughter of Robert Evans, a sturdy and prosperous land agent in Warwickshire. But Mary Anne sounds rather like a servant’s name (the White Rabbit’s housemaid is called Mary Ann). As the rising fortunes of the family gave her a lady’s education, she began to experiment ...”

“... listen that he was headed for the White House. He mapped out a plan to get there from which, as Robert Caro writes, ‘he refused to be diverted.’ It meant first establishing himself in state politics, then winning a seat in the House of Representatives, then moving up to the Senate and finally to the highest office. He was undaunted by the fact that no ...”

“... and another shove with that metallic rush of blades. In American films of the 1940s and 1950s, Robert Ryan (1909-73) seemed one of the angry men of the war who never quite grew reconciled to the life that came after. He lived in North Hollywood too and I may once have caught a glimpse of him. Was this the reason his face looked familiar the first time I ...”