“... performer and avant-gardist, one of the first women to make her mark as a conceptual artist. William Burroughs is usually mentioned as the single most important influence on Acker’s writing, but, although he plainly was extremely important to her, the context in which she read Burroughs had already been set by the cultural formation that she had ...”

“... their earliest included poem). The first half of the book has (in order) Tennyson, Emily Brontë, William Barnes, Elizabeth Barrett and Robert Browning, Clare, Carroll, Clough, Dante Gabriel and Christina Rossetti, and Arnold, who, fittingly, is the pivotal figure. After this, though big names are not lacking, their contribution weighs less, in several cases ...”

“... Richier among them. The second, more positive category included Henry Moore, Ceri Richards, William Roberts, Josef Herman, David Bomberg, L.S. Lowry, George Fullard and Frank Auerbach, together with the Dutchman Friso ten Holt. Of these, only the enthusiastic review of Lowry is included in the new collection, which is overwhelmingly dominated by ...”

“... about being an ill-educated ‘peasant’. Nevertheless he seized on Heraclitus, Hopkins and James Joyce in particular in his one year as a student and developed demanding tastes in music, literature and art. Graham became a farm-labourer in Galway, travelled with a fair and worked on the docks in Dublin to avoid conscription in 1939, but failed his Army ...”

“... 1534, when her sister threw her out of the court after her secret marriage to a Mr Nobody called William Stafford. Grumble all you like about the feminisation of history, at Henry’s court you can’t avoid it; the politics of sex and procreation dominate, so chatter of caudles and possets and babies’ caps drowns out the masculine drone of tunnage and ...”

“... Kunkel found references to several possible projects: a big New York novel in the manner of James Joyce whom Mitchell admired above all other moderns; a life and times of a smart and funny woman who hung out with New Yorker writers and married one of them; a big personality piece about an Italian carter named Joe Cantalupo who was a fixture of the ...”

“... moles. This seems to me wrong-headed in several different ways. The key judgment is surely that of William Strang, the Under-Secretary of State at the Foreign Office, in a paper of May 1943: We need Russian collaboration. The conclusion of the Anglo-Soviet Treaty marks our decision that this must be our policy … even if fears that Russia lay a ‘heavy ...”

“... business as a Maltese cat’.Mabel now concentrated on their publicity strategy. She contacted William Dean Howells, editor of the Atlantic Monthly, who agreed to write a piece on Dickinson. Of all the reviewers of the 1890 volume, Howells was the most intuitive:Occasionally, the outside of the poem, so to speak, is left so rough, so rude, that the art ...”

“... evil doers’. Leyland also became a partner in a bank jointly run by the Liverpool abolitionist William Roscoe, whom Melville singled out as ‘good and great’. Lawyer, art collector, botanist and public benefactor, Roscoe was elected MP for the city, after the usual round of bribery, in 1806, just in time to make himself unpopular by voting for ...”

“... with more critical praise than any other piece of fiction published in the US in 2009 (see James Wood’s review in the New Yorker, for one example among many). Many of Davis’s readers have tended to argue that her power is in the microscope she applies to her own life. In ‘Mrs D and Her Maids’, for example, Mrs D writes to a prospective maid ...”

“... Depending​ where you look, the William Burroughs centenary has either occasioned an outpouring of variously celebratory and carping prose, or a trickle of grudging acknowledgment in outlets thought to speak for the literary establishment. Writing on anything of passing public interest triggers an online avalanche of ad hominem posturing which quickly renders the original topic, whatever it was, numbingly opaque ...”

“... the Gulag were being asked by left oppositionists, from Boris Souvarine to Victor Serge to C.L.R. James, in real time and at great peril. Those courageous and prescient heretics have been somewhat written out of history (they expected far worse than that, and often received it).’ This internal dissent was a natural part of the Communist movement, in clear ...”

“... Forrester appeared in May 1864. ‘Forrester’ was a pseudonym – the author’s actual name was James Ware – chosen to capitalise on the fame of the Forrester brothers, former Bow Street Runners; Ware’s earlier police ‘casebooks’ under that name had led readers to speculate that the Forresters were the real authors. Ware’s heroine, Miss ...”

“... and of complaints kept at bay. Like the previous modern biographies by R. George Thomas (1985) and William Cooke (1970), but slightly more so, Wilson’s book is really the story, despite her equivocations, of Thomas’s despair; and then of the remarkable and brief late flowering and flaring of his poetry, with his untimely and now famous early death at Arras ...”

“... the Royal Navy was riddled with popery and that the Duke of York (Lord High Admiral and the future James II) had wasted public funds. A select committee was appointed to investigate. When his enemies won the general election in March, the duke fled. In his absence, Samuel Pepys, as secretary of the navy, was left to face the music. Pepys was found guilty of ...”