“... have sat in the church where I was once an altar girl.In the opening chapter of The Pilgrimage, Michael and his wife, Julia, sit in their living room with Father Victor, the local priest, and Michael’s nephew Jim, a doctor. The group is organising a pilgrimage to Lourdes, a destination not only spiritually enlightening ...”

“... paedophile, martyr, traitor, major minor writer. In an Omnibus programme broadcast late last year, Michael Bracewell claimed that he was ‘the century’s first pop celebrity’, and tried to persuade us that, in the manner of an Elvis or a McCartney, Wilde was a working-class lad made good. Cut to a shot of Bracewell looking uncomfortable in a gargoyled ...”

“... Commenting on​ Occupy Wall Street in late 2011, Barney Frank, then a Democratic congressman for Massachusetts, voiced a common complaint: ‘I don’t understand why people think that simply being in a physical place does much.’ Nearly five years later, it isn’t easy to decide whether Frank was right ...”

“... Born in Hungary, Cordell had arrived in Britain after the war with her husband, the composer Frank Cordell, and soon became part of the London scene. She was the only female painter in the Independent Group, a band of artists, architects and designers who hung out at the Institute of Contemporary Arts on Dover Street. She made her name in the ...”

“... many will think again. If the Tories pour in money for investment it might be different, though Michael Heseltine’s regeneration of some inner cities during the Thatcher years had very little real impact.Could this all have been avoided? Corbyn was in a very difficult position. His own close allies had moved away from him on Brexit. His statement that he ...”

“... generally short, are prose poems by another name. (‘It is even in/prose, I am a real poet,’ as Frank O’Hara put it.) The exception is her collected lectures, Madness, Rack and Honey (2012), which, she has observed, has been far more successful than any of her poetry collections.Ruefle has been the poet laureate of Vermont since 2019. She brings to the ...”

“... of the European war. In I Confess, the war appears to suggest a reason why Clift’s character, Michael Logan, should become a Roman Catholic priest. The war had made these characters, giving them confidence, troubling them with memories. So it was perhaps that the 1950s were the decade of neurosis. For all their resistance to the ‘torn T-shirt ...”

“... men and women, are nicer than most folks in fiction, or in fact. They are a lot nicer than Frank Tuohy’s characters. But then, niceness is not all. Some of Tuohy’s stories wander rather mournfully through Maugham country, highlighting various modes of English exile, and reminding us that failure is usually shoddy rather than spectacular, that life ...”

“... death kissed me. I kissed it back’ (both in ‘Hymn to Life’, which is like a stray elegy). Frank O’Hara, Schuyler’s friend and sometime flatmate, is very obviously there (I’ll keep myself therefore to one example): ‘Look, Mitterrand baby’ (‘Simone Signoret’). O’Hara aside, this is not a matter of being influenced – or influential. The ...”

“... from its epigraph from Oscar Wilde, to the 19-part persona poem about the Antarctic explorer Frank Wild, which just about anyone might have written, and isn’t a patch on W.S. Graham’s book Malcolm Mooney’s Land or Brodsky’s ‘A Polar Explorer’, to a standard-issue inter-poet wadding of references to Archimedes, Bismarck, the Bible, Elizabeth ...”

“... Asked in 1933 what his favourite among his own poems was, Wallace Stevens said he liked best ‘The Emperor of Ice-Cream’, from Harmonium (1923). The work ‘wears a deliberately commonplace costume’, Stevens said, ‘and yet seems to me to contain something of the essential gaudiness of poetry’. He didn’t remember much about writing the poem except ‘the state of mind from which it came’: ‘I dislike niggling, and like letting myself go ...”

“... invested in the War Loan, to protect their finances against any postwar Labour government. As Michael Smith describes, these problems were exacerbated by the budget cuts which followed the end of hostilities. In 1919, MI5’s annual grant dropped from £100,000 to £30,000, forcing it into unsavoury alliances with the political Right. It recruited Maxwell ...”

“... of Bette Davis, asked her to repeat her portrayal of June Buckridge in the film version of Frank Marcus’s The Killing of Sister George. Sister George was an important turning-point. Her career had brought her to the Alexandra Theatre, Birmingham, and Mother Goose, where she was upstaged each night by Frank Ifield ...”

“... A mystique of language for its own sake is the power source and the danger of Modernism. Michael Schmidt’s five American poets avoid (the best of their work avoids) both abstractions. The language has a life of its own and a life in relation to a recognisable real world, as in James McMichael’s ‘Compline’: Gudique is the chastening. She is ...”

“... of the poems in Early Works have a chatty, diurnal music that can also be heard in the work of Frank O’Hara or John Ashbery. Ashbery’s notion of the poem as ‘the chronicle of the creative act that produces it’ is a good description of Notley’s shapely, improvisatory poetics – full of changing weather, changing clothes, the impressions of the ...”