“... not really in place. More important is Davie’s status as the don’s poet, or the don as poet. William Empson was never that, was indeed rather positively committed to his own version of the English metaphysical manner, a manner as blunt and accessible as in Herbert’s poetry or Aubrey’s prose. As Bernard Bergonzi shows in an acute and learned ...”

“... one of those who care a great deal for the writers of Eastern Europe, and the experiments of William Carlos Williams and the Beats. I’d first met him when I was a student myself, in the Eighties, when travelling across America by car seemed like the right sort of thing to be doing. There was a gang of us then, and we got jobs working in pizza places or ...”

“... next ten years firefighting the publication of pirated editions. (The poem mocks, among others, Thomas Moore, who became his friend, and the critic Francis Jeffrey, who became his champion.) He came back to London with two manuscripts in his luggage: Hints from Horace, a gentler sequel to English Bards, in which he leavens the satire with some literary ...”

“... of John and Jane Beegan. In 1901 they were living together with the younger Beegans, Mary and Thomas, at 23 Dunlo Hill in Ballinasloe. On the census form, John Beegan senior describes himself and his two sons, John Leo and Thomas, as stonecutters. Ten years later, in the 1911 census, he chose the term ‘monumental ...”

“... found success outside it: J.G. Ballard as an author of realist novels, Samuel Delany in academia, William Gibson, Lethem himself (whose first books owed a lot to Dick). The sciences – biomedical sciences, climatology, ecology, information technology – seem omnipresent now. It should surprise no one that at least one writer who spent most of his life in SF ...”

“... produced unpredictable surges that were seen in every insurgent city. ‘Fear,’ wrote Emile Thomas, the architect of the National Workshops in Paris and later a zealous Bonapartist, ‘has been the presiding emotion of our revolution.’Liberal leaders feared they might be unable to control the social energies released by the revolution. People of ...”

“... as such assumed the dignity of supreme values.’ There is a curious prefiguration of this mood in Thomas Mann’s Death in Venice, when the protagonist indulges in ‘lawless hopes’ that have no future, because ‘passion is like crime … it welcomes every blow dealt the bourgeois structure, every weakening of the social fabric.’ Needless to say, this is ...”

“... of the Republic – records a melancholy trip he made to Stratford in 1786 in the company of Thomas Jefferson. The Americans cut slivers from an old chair in which Shakespeare had supposedly sat, and, beginning a tradition to which Henry James and T.S. Eliot were heirs, proceeded to admonish the bemused locals on their ignorance of their own ...”

“... It is this aspect of the paedophile predicament which is so sympathetically captured by William Golding in his portrait of Mr Pedigree, the poor benighted soul who haunts the municipal parks of Greenfield in Darkness Visible. Mr Pedigree is described as ‘stuck like a broken gramophone record’. Carpenter’s insistence on researching the last ...”

“... masts went as high as that. The four-arch bridge across the River Irvine was built by a certain Thomas Brown in 1750, for the price of £350. Ten years before, the Royal Burgh’s sunken wells, dank and rotten, had been replaced by the Council. Pump wells were installed, and fresh water was all the rage. The second half of the 18th century, in a small ...”

“... as ‘great poetry’. Ireland has lately produced almost a glut of distinguished poets, including Thomas Kinsella, Derek Mahon, Nuala Ní Dhomhnaill and Michael Longley. Yet their audience is relatively small. What’s different about Heaney? Fennell has several answers extraneous to poetry, but he ends up highlighting the academic agendas satisfied by his ...”

“... of around a hundred words to the American edition. The most used ‘Scotticisms’, according to William K. Malcolm’s new biography, are modifiers such as awful, bit, coarse, fair, fell, ‘cosmetic rather than descriptive’, easy enough for diaspora Scots, more than a quarter of a million of whom left for North America in the 1920s alone.The question of ...”

“... highly recommended. From Paris, it was on to New York. Meeting Partisan Review’s co-editor William Phillips at a party, Sontag, now a single mother living on a shoestring, got right to business: ‘How do you write a review for Partisan Review?’ ‘You ask,’ Phillips replied. ‘I’m asking,’ she said, and, open sesame, she was in. The ...”

“... you may fight a hundred battles and not lose one. Sun Tzu, The Art of War, c.450 BC The historian William Manchester, who served with him in the Pacific, said he was the greatest soldier in American history. Never much regarded in Britain, he is still recalled with loathing in Australia. When Americans remember him, it is with something close to ...”

“... Infinite Jest in particular is like a house party to which he’s invited all of his professors. Thomas Pynchon is in the kitchen, opening a can of expired tuna with his teeth. William Gaddis is in the den, reading ticker-tape off a version of C-Span that watches the senators go to the bathroom. Don DeLillo is three houses ...”