“... in Lowell himself, but simply makes a graffiti scribble across the simple mystery of Woman in Blue Reading a Letter. Vermeer is the reverse of a king; his art the very opposite of Lowell’s credo that ‘the artist’s existence becomes his art.’ Vermeer’s pictures are endlessly mysterious and commonplace precisely because the artist is not in them, has ...”

“... poetry was little read or appreciated. The links between Graham and the painters Roger Hilton, Peter Lanyon, Bryan Wynter, Karl Weschke and Sven Berlin were forged by his understanding of their work: it was his dedication to art, rather than his own art, that impressed them. Hilton said he found Graham’s poems ‘too obscure’, provoking a remarkably ...”

“... of Mark Ravenhill, the creation myth of the contemporary British theatre. Over recent years that reading has been challenged by academics, critics and some theatre practitioners keen to question the play’s impact and legacy. They have argued for the rehabilitation of the supposedly moribund theatrical culture that preceded Look Back in Anger, proposed ...”

“... see past. McGann’s starting point is a belief, shared by Bernard Beatty in his essay collection Reading Byron, that the ‘poetic character’ of large swathes of Byron’s work – the non-comic material, much of it produced before his turn to the ottava rima stanza in 1817 – has been ‘obscured by Don Juan’s celebrity’, underestimated and ...”

“... the central image of the last poem Rilke ever wrote. Yet Rilke’s letters don’t make for easy reading, and trying to say why is one way of coming close to the core of his poetry. The letters are colourful, varied, rich in metaphor, and full of surprising turns: yet they lack the spontaneity and informality for which we treasure the letters of great ...”

“... something like a Conrad who had soaked himself in Beckett, or a Dashiell Hammett who had been reading Camus and Ionesco. These are wild approximations, of course. Onetti’s voice and subject-matter are his own, and their very elusiveness has played a part in his neglect. The other part was played by accident. Onetti was too late for some fashions and too ...”

“... Dr Abse’s analogy is false. There are clear differences of degree in anti-semitism. Reviewing Peter Ackroyd’s biography of Eliot (LRB, Vol. 6, No 20), Professor Ricks began: ‘Peter Ackroyd has written a benign life of T.S. Eliot. Given the malignity visited on Eliot, this is a good deal.’ I ...”

“... appropriately) a ‘Wanted’ poster. In April 1939, Auden, Isherwood and MacNeice gave a reading at the Keynote Club in Manhattan. Kallman and another Brooklyn student, Walter James Miller, were in the audience, with Kallman sitting in the front row giving the two international pederasts the glad eye. Afterwards he and Miller went backstage. Miller ...”

“... speaking which would offer an advance. There is no sign that this is likely to happen. True, Sir Peter Medawar effected a brief release when challenging his field’s version of the nature-nurture antithesis with the instance of innate potentialities never to be actualised unless the environment were right. But feud is collusive, and the parties usually ...”

“... that side of the Atlantic, without ever managing to communicate his whereabouts to anyone at home. Peter Ackroyd’s Milton in America (1996) seems curiously, if perhaps unconsciously, parasitic on this earlier extravaganza. Milton, however, despite some fleeting fictional attention from Robert Graves, has never been able to vie with the Romantics in this ...”

“... In ‘A Spring Wind’ Spencer describes himself loving Greece ‘out of all reason’ as he sits reading the poems of Odysseus Elytis. In the wake of Elytis’s 1979 Nobel Prize, a selection of his poems over four decades has been made available in English – a welcome development, though not as rewarding as one might have hoped. As the Hellenic landscape ...”

“... is a God, the God of the Jews, of Moses and Elias, But this is not the time to speak of him. Peter McDonald has the misfortune of being introduced as one of the most promising of the younger generation of Northern Irish poets. It is of course another accident of priority that the work of any young Northern Irish poet now writing is going to invite ...”

“... Rage and Betrayal, the highly prejudicial ABC programme of 12 April 1996, in which the newscaster Peter Jennings called McVeigh a ‘monster’ and cited passages from Pierce’s book. Parallels between bomb-making in The Turner Diaries and by McVeigh were made much of in Joseph Hartzler’s opening address to the jury. The only material evidence produced by ...”

“... neo-Georgian façade. The mural, though, is authentic, and now dominates one wall of the main reading room. It is a confident if galumphing effort in the style of Mexican muralism, in which a supersized proletarian overturns St Paul’s Cathedral on one side and the Houses of Parliament on the other, while Lenin, William Morris, Marx, Engels, Robert Owen ...”

“... some other cities. The legislation which brought in Asbos, she explains, came out of a New Labour reading of the American ‘Communitarian’ movement that encouraged ministers to believe they could deliver good public behaviour. She describes the cowed and restrictive culture which resulted in Salford, where the least street gathering of teenagers was likely ...”