“... Grecian urns, the zephyrs and graces in Botticelli, the volumetric musculatures in drawings by Blake. She pulled meaning out of repose – ‘what she gives us is a sort of sculpture in transition,’ Ernest Newman wrote – and may be more truly grouped with Sarah Bernhardt and Eleanora Duse (Duncan and Duse were close friends, possibly lovers). Certainly ...”

“... Beckett, Happy DaysThe Irish propensity for violence is well known; at least to the English.Charles Townshend, Political Violence in IrelandIn 1934, Marina Tsvetaeva wrote an essay called ‘Poets with History and Poets without History’. All poets, she said, belong to one or the other of these categories, and it becomes clear that the poet with ...”

“... jump-cuts of a career begun as a teenager when Moorcock hacked out Tarzan Adventures, Sexton Blake thrillers and camp-fire yarns of the purple sage. ‘At the age of 17, sitting in a dark little room in South London in the late 1950s,’ he wrote in the introduction to Tales from the Texas Woods, ‘I earned a wonderful living writing about an Arizona ...”

“... Inglis introduces us to the mourners – Terry Eagleton, ‘small, solid, mischievous’; Charles Swann, ‘wheezing with his awful respiration’; Patrick Parrinder, ‘silent, smiling, ironic’, the best-dressed of the party; Tariq Ali with ‘lustrous brown eyes’ but (Inglis claims) ‘a bit out of it all’. As a narrative device it is ...”

“... of the Hudson. In New York, Oppen met Louis Zukofsky, who had already been published by Pound, and Charles Reznikoff, an attorney at work on a law encyclopedia. The three poets, grown uneasy with Imagism and keen to distinguish themselves, conceived a publishing venture which was very much in the Oppens’ mind when they took off for Europe in 1929. They ...”

“... crystals, beard care and curated playlists. As with the Beatles album sleeves designed by Peter Blake and Richard Hamilton, this was where art and pop first locked eyes, before deciding to move in together.Ahalf-century​ on from the band’s messy divorce, you don’t have to go searching for Beatles bumpf: it’s everywhere. They’re as much a part of ...”

“... taught at Berkeley, Heaney writes to Michael Longley: ‘stupid, illiterate, long-haired, hippie, Blake-ridden, Ginsberg-gullible, assholes (assholes or cunts, I hear you cry). Seriously though, it is an exhausting assignment with a lot of anxious and eager kids all wanting to hear they’re the greatest thing since, say, ...”

“... and Joni Mitchell; other guests included Merle Haggard, Mama Cass, Odetta, Linda Ronstadt, Ray Charles, Judy Collins, Burl Ives and Kris Kristofferson. The show first aired in September 1969; in February of that year Cash was busy recording with Dylan (they duet, kind of, on ‘Girl from the North Country’, the first track on Dylan’s ...”

“... volume of High Windows and there were the PCs (which were not PC at all) he used to send to Charles Monteith, including one not quoted here or in the Selected Letters. Along with other Faber authors Larkin had been circularised asking what events, if any, he was prepared to take part in to mark National Libraries Week. Larkin wrote back saying that the ...”

“... life. A feud between sisters? Isn’t that … female? We know about the tragic loss of her son, Charles, at the age of eleven, which means that she exists for us in grief, as a permanent mother. There is nothing so diminishing, to the canonical view, though anyone who has witnessed this sort of loss first-hand knows that it puts you among the Greeks, into ...”

“... queued as a boy to see at the Picturedrome on Wortley Road. Here were Alexis Smith, Eve Arnold, Charles Boyer, and Tarzan’s Jane (and Mia Farrow’s mother) Maureen O’Sullivan. The four of us from Beyond the Fringe had been invited as a unit and Dudley Moore had been prevailed on (may even have volunteered) to play the piano. With Coward in the room ...”

“... literary driftwood that seems to have found its way back into Melville from Zola, or forward from Blake: a shocking marine-industrial scene that shows how the venture of whaling itself, against which Ahab has turned so ruthlessly, is part of the madness that touches him and everyone else on the Pequod, including Ishmael. It will take a while to get to this ...”

“... across – white-walled, octagonal and windowless, with the same low light Tate Britain has in its Blake room. Seven paintings are on display, one on each wall; you go in through the eighth side of the octagon. Though plain and unadorned the space is the opposite of austere. The pictures seem alive and sentient and even to be regarding one another across the ...”