“... childhood, are written in a strain of hyperbole, sometimes as pleasingly Welsh as Dylan or Gwyn Thomas. Before we reach the third section, about his pre-war adventures among Arabs, Cubans and Sicilians, we have been astonished by his weird boyhood in Carmarthen and Enfield, where his experiences seem scarcely less bizarre and exotic. We no longer think of ...”

“... New York but Minneapolis, where the behaviourist B.F. Skinner worked, and where, since 1969, Thomas Bouchard has taught a course on the ‘measurement’ of individual personalities and twins. ‘Not every university offers such a course,’ Bouchard has remarked, ‘in part because race, gender and class differences are closely compared, which arouses ...”

“... gyres. It likes Wendy Cope and Emily Dickinson, Sylvia Plath and Anne Sexton, Robert Lowell and Thomas Hardy and the lullabies of Housman. It prefers poets whose speakers say how they feel, and feel what they say, while never running out of rhythm and never speaking in tongues. It likes Philip Larkin, the unlikely patron saint of self-help, though it’s ...”

“... Material Place – ‘All men say “What” to me,’ Emily Dickinson wrote in a letter to Thomas Wentworth Higginson. She certainly mystified Higginson. He never entirely overcame his uneasiness about her odd, disjunctive words and bewildering epistolary tones and seven years into their correspondence still complained of being unable to get beyond the ...”

“... seventies. The Swans had always lived in Littlehampton, a middling-sized Sussex town with a sandy beach and a pier whose architecture was described by Pevsner as ‘a rather bewildering mixture of Old Hastings and Bournemouth’. By the time of the libels, most of her older siblings had left home. Only two brothers, Stephen and Ernest, both of them labourers ...”

“... in getting it to stay; and in terms of fixing, his process was not yet an emphatic advance on what Thomas Wedgwood and Humphry Davy had achieved in 1802. His prints were faint and liable to fade; he could stabilise the image but not fix it permanently. In February 1839, Herschel persuaded Talbot that there was no point in guarding his own secret due to ‘the ...”

“... One of the tempests Doc writes about in Songs is the Florida criminal trial of dishevelled Palm Beach heiress and cocaine slut Roxanne Pulitzer, and his words on that abominable scene richly echo the gnarled politics that have both paralysed America as a whole and effectively crippled the one thing that Doc holds so dear – the craft of journalism. Not ...”

“... serve to underwrite the poet’s imaginative participation in the soldiers’ frolics on the beach. The militarised male body throws off its ‘bestial strength/And bestial decay’ and grows ‘fragile and luminous’: Stands in the soft air, tasting after toil The sweetness of his nakedness: letting the sea-waves coil Their frothy tongues about his ...”

“... This is all too reminiscent of the standard schoolboy cynic argument: I choose to lounge on the beach; Mother Theresa chooses to care for the poor in India; we both do what makes us feel good, and both do what we want to do; so what’s the difference? Arguments like this have long been used by adolescents to ward off burdensome distinctions like that ...”

“... and unambiguous sexual invitation’. Hope has been rebuked for saying this – for example, by Thomas Puttfarken in the present journal (Vol. 3, No 6). The great nudes of modern art – women transformed by Henry Moore into stones and bones, by Picasso into erotic hieroglyphics, and by Matisse into lyrical calligraphy – are not only far less naturalistic ...”

“... the implications are still open. Dyce remained a deeply religious man. Pegwell Bay is not Dover Beach. Dyce’s other commission that year was a mural on the east end of the Ecclesiologists’ show church, All Saints, Margaret Street. The church, like the picture, was an expression of the high Victorian moment that, for a while, held faith and science in ...”

“... that Bill Gates earned more than the lowest-paid 40 per cent of Americans combined. ‘Once,’ Thomas Frank writes in his terrific book One Market under God :2 Americans imagined that economic democracy meant a reasonable standard of living for all – that freedom was only meaningful once poverty and powerlessness had been ...”

“... most strongly have enjoyed critical sponsorship: Roy Fisher and J.H. Prynne in Donald Davie’s Thomas Hardy and British Poetry, the late Veronica Forrest-Thomson through her own theoretical book Poetic Artifice. In spurning both a polemical introduction and the biographical notes, this anthology may define itself against the run of post-war ...”

“... have started a St Patrick’s Day parade – among them Fairbanks, Albuquerque, Honolulu and Palm Beach. But how Irish does taking part in a parade make you? This is the concern of Irish America, which asks whether people who identify themselves as Irish-Americans have distinctive ways of behaving or thinking, five, six or seven generations down from the ...”

“... In​ the summer of 1963, between the appearance of Thomas Pynchon’s first book and the Beatles’ second long-player, John Williams, a professor at the University of Denver, sent his agent in New York a draft of his latest novel, which detailed the unhappy marriage, undistinguished career and early death from cancer of an imagined professor at the University of Missouri a generation earlier ...”