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“... One of Donald Davie’s early poems, and one of his strongest, is ‘Pushkin: A Didactic Poem’, from Brides of Reason (1955). As in Davie’s ‘Dream Forest’, Pushkin is taken as a model, a poet Who recognised no checks Yet brooked them all – a mind Molten and thereby fluent, Unforced, easily strict. In this didactic poem the speaker is professional, drawing his comparisons with rehearsed casualness: In the matter of Pushkin, Emily Brontë Is the best analogy in some ways Among our poets ...”

“... opinion that the judgment pertained strictly to abortion; but in a supporting opinion, Clarence Thomas suggested that the court ‘reconsider all of this court’s substantive due process precedents’, including contraception, same-sex relationships and same-sex marriage. The Dobbs decision would have been unimaginable without Trump, who appointed three ...”

“... ideological lineage going back to the Republican Party of the 1790s, a radical organisation led by Thomas Jefferson. The first party system gave way around 1830 to the battles of the Whigs and the Jacksonian Democrats. The emergence of today’s Republican Party during the 1850s as an open adversary of Southern ‘Slave Power’ and the advent of the Civil War ...”

“... categories: stages of the disease that comported with chances of survival. In the 1960s Donald Gleason, a pathologist working for the US Veterans Administration developed the eponymous Gleason five-stage scale for assessing prostate cancer; it’s now one of hundreds of similar systems based on pathological and genetic analysis. A gigantic web of ...”

“... His career began auspiciously in the early 1940s with the enthusiastic support of his hero Dylan Thomas, but the surrealism of his early collections, such as Cage without Grievance and 2ND Poems, seemed to mark him out as an oddity who could easily be ignored. The White Threshold in 1949 and The Nightfishing in 1955 made a conscious break with his earliest ...”

“... In 1912 Frost moved his family to England and met many writers, including Yeats, Pound and Edward Thomas, who would become his closest friend. Before returning to America in 1915, he wrote home with some news: ‘To be perfectly frank with you I am one of the most notable craftsmen of my time. That will transpire presently.’ In their sharp-witted ...”

“... were pronounced. Harold Cohen was ‘never to be mentioned again. He is an ignorant person’, Donald Davie was a ‘wretch’, and R.B. Kitaj ‘one of the very worst painters of the century’. When words were insufficient, Finlay’s indignation broke out in truncated sound poems (‘Agh, agh, yah, boo, ach, och, yugh, pugh, poo, pshaw and dash ...”

“... said some colleagues wouldn’t join events with the word ‘refugee’ in the programme: ‘Thomas Mann was a refugee, but we don’t remember him as a “refugee writer”. The classification is problematic.’ Two novels published in English last year reject the paradigm. The Lebanese author Hoda Barakat’s Voices of the Lost came to attention after ...”

“... Korn; Generals Peckem and Dreedle, Major ______ de Coverley, Doc Daneeka, Milo Minderbinder (the Donald Trump of black marketeers); Sergeant Towser, Dunbar, the soldier in white, Major Major (whose first and middle names are also Major, and who has been promoted to Major by an IBM processing error); Chaplain Tappman, Nurse Duckett, two agents from the ...”

“... a self-inflicted lèse-majesté. In another age, the Tower of London would be dusting down Thomas More’s old cell for him. But it would be unfair to dismiss Batten as a know-nothing stirrer, though often his behaviour does seem to fit that description: calling Islam‘a death cult’, claiming that the EU was inspired by Hitler’s plans for Europe ...”

“... Enright’s volume contained work by eight poets: Robert Conquest, D.J. Enright, Kingsley Amis, Donald Davie, John Holloway, Elizabeth Jennings, Philip Larkin and John Wain, to which list Conquest’s volume added the name of Thom Gunn. Insofar as there has ever been agreement on the matter, the Movement has been taken to consist of these nine writers. They ...”

“... of delirious associations and interpretations’, and the crazy-enough-to-be-true projections of Thomas Pynchon, Philip K. Dick, William Burroughs and J.G. Ballard (who wrote incisively about Surrealism). The afterlife of Surrealism is more active in poetry, as in the New York School of Frank O’Hara, John Ashbery and others: ‘We all “grew up ...”

“... changed everything. Major John Cartwright (who was later to advise the Manchester radicals) and Thomas Paine were influenced by the American programme in their arguments for domestic reform, Take Your Choice! and Common Sense. Yet it was the French Revolution that made the working classes begin to see universal manhood suffrage, equal representation for all ...”

“... just nine months, since the all-consuming public issue in the United States was the impeachment of Donald Trump. The trial was a giant anticlimax, of course, its proceedings lacking witnesses, its outcome predetermined. That Trump remains in the White House reminds us that there is almost no way of unseating an American president, even one manifestly unfit for ...”

“... Kirkup, one gets the impression, is a man who’s seen it all. He’s seen Guy Burgess and Donald Maclean have a drunken row, Quentin Crisp mincing the streets, Dylan Thomas in an alcoholic stupor reciting poetry in a loud voice, and much else. Including, perhaps, Wittgenstein cruising for rough trade? Surely, one ...”