“... repugnant – artfulness of any kind seems. ‘In the presence of the violent reality of war,’ Wallace Stevens wrote, ‘consciousness takes the place of the imagination. And consciousness of an immense war is a consciousness of fact.’ It’s some such argument that lies behind the 1939-45 revulsion against Modernism, or indeed any kind of artistic ...”

“... folk-and-myth-inspired self-help (Hark delivers talks that invoke Odysseus, Hannibal, William Tell etc), mental archery isn’t exactly a lampoon of any of these practices. It’s silly, and the novel says it’s silly, but it isn’t silly for the novel’s characters. Lipsyte has now written three novels about middle-aged failures (Home Land and ...”

“... known as King Philip’s War, Reverend Hope Atherton was the chaplain accompanying Captain William Turner’s militia on their march to an Algonquian encampment near Deerfield, Massachusetts in the Connecticut River Valley. There they ambushed the sleeping tribe, slaughtered some of them and drove others into the river, which swept them over the ...”

“... the concordat that would guarantee continued single-family rule. The interpreter was Colonel William Eddy, a senior US intelligence officer and much else besides. Considered too insecure during the ‘global war on terror’, Suez was rejected as a potential venue for the re-enactment: the grandsons of the two principals and Eddy’s nephew had to make ...”

“... that eventually led to current, commonly held tenets about the attentions fitting to a corpse. William Price, d.1893, was an arch druid in Wales, a surgeon, a Chartist, a vegetarian, a philoprogenetive advocate of free love, who called his child, born in his late years, Jesu Grist (sic). When the baby died, he tried to burn him on a pyre, according to ...”

“... a friend of Walter Savage Landor), but cites instead David Lynch, Jonathan Franzen, David Foster Wallace, Marcel Duchamp, William Burroughs, Frank O’Hara, Hugo Ball, Geoff Dyer, Kafka, Samuel Beckett, Bob Dylan, Bruce Springsteen, Muhammad Ali, Joe Louis.Lamb deserves​ much better than this. He deserves, most of ...”

“... Commenting on the influence on him of the American ‘greats’ in 1959, Schuyler said that William Carlos Williams and Wallace Stevens inspired greater freedom than the others. The freedom of Schuyler’s red isn’t quite the concretion of Williams’s red wheelbarrow, or the dream of Stevens’s drunken sailor ...”

“... linked with a group of US fiction writers around his age that includes the late David Foster Wallace, George Saunders, Jonathan Franzen and Jeffrey Eugenides. There are a few things that set Antrim apart: he’s Southern; his strongest affinity to a writer in the previous generation is to Donald Barthelme, not Don DeLillo; he’s the least likely to be ...”

“... profound self-abnegation to a different end. The hunger strikes started in June 1909 with Marion Wallace Dunlop, an artist, throwing fried fish, bananas and hot milk out of the window of her cell. Asked what she would have for dinner, she replied: ‘My determination.’ To start with, going on hunger strike seemed a brilliant ruse for securing early release ...”

“... returns with elliptical reports from which the tribe’s younger storytellers, from David Foster Wallace on, set about extracting a style and a tone attuned to new ways of feeling and not feeling. One constant throughout these risk-filled spirit voyages has been DeLillo’s superbly take-it-or-leave-it posture towards the laity. ‘The writer leads, he ...”

“... the seas and come … to B … a small town fastened to a field in Indiana,’ the late, great William Gass began his imperishable short story ‘In the Heart of the Heart of the Country’, from 1968. Or, with his and your permission, ‘I have sailed the seas and come … to G … a healthcare mecca and football burg that was previously a town with a ...”

“... The difference between ‘selected’ and ‘collected’ poems, Wallace Stevens wrote in a letter in 1954, is that ‘people read selected poems but don’t buy them’ and ‘buy collected poems but don’t read them’. The symbolism of a collected volume worried him: ‘A book that contains everything that one has done in a lifetime does not reassure one ...”

“... is from one of Keats’s letters). She seems to have no special affinity for Eliot or Auden or William Carlos Williams, although she has written well about the first two. (But then she will surprise, as she should, by praising Donald Davie, or attending to Allen Ginsberg.) If the lyric poem is self-contained and in some sense self-adjusting, then it ...”

“... without leaving London or even going to the exhibition: the Van Dycks in the National Gallery, the Wallace Collection and the Queen’s Collection which have not been lent for the exhibition are at least as powerful as the portraits that have been. But what we couldn’t otherwise have seen without going abroad is the florid Catholicism of the religious ...”

“... Sidney Blumenthal, then at the New Yorker, and two journalists from the Daily Telegraph – William Deedes, on whom Evelyn Waugh modelled William Boot in Scoop, and Ambrose Evans-Pritchard, who would make a career attacking the Clintons. Deedes and Evans-Pritchard’s way of covering the still-born convention was to ...”