“... 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 ...”

“... intentions. The reference to ‘one idea’ recalls the passage in ‘Esthétique du Mal’ where Wallace Stevens dismisses                                      the lunatic of one idea         In a world of ideas, who would have all the people Live, work, suffer and die in that idea In a world of ideas. The cure ...”

“... contradictions of his being most subtly and most dramatically. In The Double in Literature (1970) Robert Rogers pointed out that the young captain narrator ‘symbolically summoned his double’ by leaving a rope-ladder dangling over the side, as if in a tale by Hoffmann, whom Conrad mentions elsewhere, and that the story conjures up the contrasting sides of ...”

“... peer, Victor Bulwer-Lytton, the second Earl of Lytton; her late father was the poet and statesman Robert Bulwer-Lytton, who had been viceroy of India at the time of the Great Famine of 1876. This was her first stay in prison, and she had been looking forward to seeing how badly women were treated there: instead she was placed in the hospital wing, where she ...”

“... When​  Libra came out in 1988, the American writer Robert Towers said that it had made Don DeLillo the ‘chief shaman of the paranoid school of American fiction’. ‘Paranoid school’ doesn’t get you very far – Pynchon and Mailer, both broad-brush comparisons, were the other faculty members Towers had in mind – but there’s mileage in the notion of DeLillo as a shaman ...”

“... The difference between ‘selected’ and ‘collected’ poems, Wallace Stevens wrote in a letter in 1954, is that ‘people read selected poems but don’t buy them’ and ‘buy collected poems but don’t read them’. The symbolism of a collected volume worried him: ‘A book that contains everything that one has done in a lifetime does not reassure one ...”

“... properly) advised by his lawyers to settle for £5000. The barrister who advised him was Robert McCartney QC. Mr McCartney had recently won a celebrated libel action in Belfast against the Sunday World. The paper had alleged, falsely, that Mr McCartney and another barrister had had a row in a café over the last available cream bun. This report, the ...”

“... in drawing coy attention to its nonsensicality. The watchword of such verse should be a line from Wallace Stevens: ‘Life’s nonsense pierces us with strange relation.’ The strange relation is inevitable to poetry, and to its supreme fiction, but to pursue it consciously is to achieve tedium, as Joyce does in Finnegans Wake. ‘Any poet is a ...”

“... was centred on London. Well, not all: Dreiser, Eugene O’Neill, William Carlos Williams and Wallace Stevens (like Pound and his protégés, an early contributor to Poetry, Chicago) stayed behind; so did the group of young painters and photographers associated with Alfred Stieglitz’s quarterly Camera Work. Besides, it was always possible to import ...”

“... Poetry pro that I hardly am, I feel that, and I guess Ian Hamilton does too. His biography of Robert Lowell came out in 1982 (at the time, I was half-seriously trying to write a PhD on him). Hamilton, as he writes in ‘A Biographer’s Misgivings’, the first piece in Walking Possession, knew his subject fairly well: ‘I had seen quite a lot of Lowell ...”

“... so much but was unable to construct a fully formed, readable dramatic character: because, as Wallace Stevens said, ‘no one is ever simply himself but is always compounded of other people.’ For Beddoes the self was a graveyard, and his own was cluttered with the bodies of Keats and Shelley, Marlowe and Webster. Writing tragic drama legitimised his ...”

“... during the late 1980s and early 1990s played this role for tuberculosis, and Deborah and Rodrick Wallace recount some of them in their chapter in Matthew Gandy and Alimuddin Zumla’s book. Cutbacks in control programmes, reductions in treatment facilities, a decaying of the culture of infection control in institutions, the provision of giant ...”