“... moments of adversity or shock or recognition were parlayed into a droll serial martyrdom. (He may be poetry’s Peter Pan, but he is also its St Sebastian.) The necessarily rather anonymous ‘I’ of the early poems becomes a fully developed character, very close to the poet, a habitual fall-guy for the poems, like the further alter ego, ‘Sonny ...”

“... itself: where it came from, who it belonged to and the righteousness of its cause. Old Labour may have something to teach New Labour after ...”

“... but didn’t know what it meant; that he thought he was but really he wasn’t. He thinks there may be something to be said for all these claims, but not enough, so the position he decides to take is that he was a Stalinist but that it remains to be seen what that meant. For him and the Italians of his generation, it meant the rescue of Europe from Nazism ...”

“... scarcely last beyond today’. ‘Like clock hands in a bar mirror’. ‘I think it may come out right this winter.’) Sound in Mahon’s poetry has a Beckettian affinity with silence. With human vitality draining into those objects on which it acts, or which act on it, the outside world, as in low-budget drama, is suggested by a few momentous ...”

“... the water. Brennan, as skipper, clears his throat, puts on his professional voice. ‘As you may have realised, this is a first,’ but now he’s laughing again. ‘Thirteen years – we’ve never seen white-sided dolphins. I mean, they exist but usually way out west in the Atlantic. Not around here.’ Someone says: ‘All we need now is killer ...”

“... parcel of Bachardy’s art-work and papers are incorporated in the Isherwood package and may well have been a deciding factor. As an art gallery and library, the Huntington is well placed to handle the miscellany. It seemed that after his move to Southern California Isherwood would recede into comfortable obscurity. Like Huxley, Chandler and ...”

“... by his subject. The awkwardness of ‘Letter to Walt Whitman’, the worst poem in Source, may have a similar origin. It also strikes a note of cloying familiarity: ‘I get ahead of myself, Walt’; ‘Then one thing made you seem alive:/your parrot, Walt’; ‘I could smell it, Walt.’ Doty is reduced to awkward inversion and linguistic ...”

“... called Chaffers coached her in the law. What Brian Thompson does not tell us is that Georgina may well have done as much as Chaffers to pave the way for the 1896 Act against vexatious litigants, which restricted the immemorial right of everyone to sue anybody else at the surfacing of a grudge. Thompson gives the first name of Chaffers as William, but this ...”

“... the orientals of today trying to imitate us, and despising their ancestors’ customs. But they may be right. After all, it is their affair to choose how they want to live. In any case I’ll admit that your country is just as ripe for independence as, shall we say, the Republics of Central America. I think our Government will soon recognise your ...”

“... gulps, half-drowns, sputters and gasps; then she squawks a bit, and starts all over again. This may be an iconised activity made sacred by some and disgusting by others, but it is first and foremost a meal. It is only occasionally serene. It also takes a long time. I do smile at her and coo a bit, but I also read a lot (she will hate books), talk, or type ...”

“... is considerably less than 1000 lines), he recalls Robert Graves’s suggestion that the long poem may be ‘nothing more than a poet’s attempt at greatness, at becoming “major” ’. While, on the one hand, Armitage asserts that ‘today, it is still the short poem that stays in the mind as language, whereas longer poems tend to be remembered for their ...”

“... the poet Rumi, is not very Persian. In a way not unlike Waley and Pound, he forgoes accuracy (he may not have been capable of it in any case), in favour of maintaining the reader’s sense that something has been lost. Rumi is euphoric in his glimpses of the beloved, and he sees him everywhere: ‘When I seek peace, he is/the kindly intercessor,/and when I ...”

“... modern world: he probably didn’t intend to say that anatomy overrides human agency, though it may well ironise it. Moi’s argument is characteristically detailed and lucid, and arrives at a reading of the Freud texts (he misquoted Napoleon twice, first apropos of all human beings, later just women) that avoids bringing in timeless and ineluctable fate by ...”

“... and much to Custine’s amusement, eloped with the Spanish Infanta. Custine’s Polish connections may have played a large part in his decision to travel to Russia, but the journey was at least in some sense undertaken to counter the ideas in Tocqueville’s La Démocratie en Amérique. ‘There are on earth today two great peoples ... they are the Russians ...”

“... David story – his relationship with God. It is the more puzzling because, for all we know, David may be an entirely fictional character, in which case it is not so much his relationship with God as the narrator’s which is our concern. Put simply, did this narrator believe in Yahweh; or, a little less simply, what kind of god did he think Yahweh was? This ...”