“... towards revels registered by the Church authorities. Advent, Ascension Day, Hocktide, Lent, May Day and saints’ days – Laroque unpacks the calendrical significances of these and related occasions. If there are queries about dates, they are answered in the intricately assembled calendars which form the appendices. Laroque might be challenged on a ...”

“... models, including her contemporaries Snodgrass and Lowell, the influence of Teasdale and Millay may have helped Sexton define herself confidently from the start as a woman poet. Apart from a brief lapse in Lowell’s workshop, when, in response to his reflex categorisation of women poets as ‘minor, definitely minor’, she expressed her fear of ‘writing ...”

“... translated. Did young women ever say, ‘Sling your hook!’ when they meant ‘Piss off!’? It may be that the structure is too plain for the scale of the book. Flashbacks alternate steadily with chapters of ‘now’ narrative, climbing up from the wartime years until they merge with Kindl’s present. The effect is of a crescendo inviting a climax, but ...”

“... The heavy procession of pain along the nerve. It may be worth adding that the influence seems least assimilated when Reed must have been working fast, for the radio: in the verses from Pytheas (1947), here printed for the first time, the master too audibly presides over all. And somewhere behind Reed’s dream ...”

“... own account of that era, we can share ‘the view from No 11’ with him. Lawson admits that he may have been ‘slow to recognise the inflationary threat in the late Eighties’, when he was still stoking up the boom in an intoxicating binge from which we are even now suffering the hangover. ‘I have no doubt that I have made my share of ...”

“... a man: an American man, that is – the Mexican men are mostly depicted as cowardly or cruel. One may suspect that McCarthy’s Mexico is the imagined space for juvenile manliness – as the advertisement for Taco Bell advises, he has made ‘a run for the Border’ – but it is also the setting for an idyll. For that is what All the Pretty Horses ...”

“... believe in the existence of the special relationship between Great Britain and the United States may be surprised to learn from MacArthur that the United States borrowed these techniques of press censorship and the pool system from the Falklands War. As Lieutenant Commander and ‘public affairs specialist’ Arthur A. Humphries explained, ‘in spite of a ...”

“... integral sanitation, and where prisoners continue to have to ‘slop out’ their pots. Thursday 1 May was my tenth day on duty, and Fred and I were beginning to look forward to a break. We spent the day gradually re-forging our ties with the local POA and preparing for the weekend. The events of the previous night had brought the National Executive of the POA ...”

“... world and of human life that was greatly more radical and far more recent in European thought than may sometimes be appreciated’. What was gradually in the process of being formed was essentially our present-day outlook: new ways of seeing and representing which were derived from a great variety of influences, including closer and more accurate scientific ...”

“... crops up in forms which Wilson, though he liked a joke himself and was an amateur conjuror, may well have thought a shade irresponsible. ‘The longer I live the more I become convinced that the only thing that matters in literature is the (more or less irrational) shamanstvo (magic) of a book, i.e., that the good writer is first of all an ...”

“... to cope with. The fact that he was so much brighter and more dedicated than the average publisher may have influenced people, but it probably did not make him many friends in the trade. Neither did his attitude to what might now fashionably be called ‘authors’ rights’. Traditional British publishers take – or, to give them the benefit of the ...”

“... is an answer to Chomsky’s question, it was not given at the Royaumont conference. Why not? It may be that Chomsky is right and that there is no answer. But there is another possibility which is never very clearly discussed in this book, and it centres on the difficulty of establishing any kind of causal hypothesis about children’s development. By and ...”

“... in that he writes poems only when he has to. It is those who fear (only too rightly) that they may not be real poets who keep up a large and uneven output. ‘Of course I’m a poet, haven’t I written a poem a day for the last ten years?’ Larkin has on more than one occasion voiced his fears about poetry becoming ‘official and subsidised’. In ...”

“... length and merged with the volume to come. What went on in Dostoevsky’s head during the 1850s we may guess largely from subsequent fiction: the fictionalised account of imprisonment in The House of the Dead, The Idiot’s speculation on what the last moments before execution must be like, Raskolnikov’s first encounter in Siberia with the New Testament. It ...”

“... Tale, having disappeared to reappear in opera, reappears again in Hollywood in 1934. ‘It may be in their awareness of themselves,’ Cavell remarks at one point in his conversation, ‘their responsibility for themselves, that the films of remarriage most deeply declare, and earn, their allegiance to Shakespearian ...”