“... Stead seems to have been misremembering or paraphrasing a line of Virginia Woolf’s about Henry James) grew out of D.T. Max’s post-mortem profile of Wallace for the New Yorker, and is very much the version of his life as seen from Times Square. ‘Every story has a beginning and this is David Wallace’s’ is Max’s first sentence. It’s a funny way to ...”

“... There was a strong documentary element in much late Modernist American writing, and epics such as William Carlos Williams’s Paterson or Charles Olson’s Maximus Poems (set in Gloucester, Massachusetts) are in essence enormous collages that attempt to capture the spirit of a place by combining memoirs, histories, town records, overheard scraps of ...”

“... Aguirre, Wrath of God (1972), which in its imagining of extremity is not as far from Eliot and Sir James Frazer as you might think. Eliot’s ‘The Hollow Men’ has an epigraph from Conrad (‘Mistah Kurtz – he dead’) and in the film Kurtz, not yet dead, reads from the poem. In the uncut version of the film, Peter Cowie tells us, Brando reads the whole ...”

“... Wootton sees as very similar to the 19th-century germ concept. Of all people, why didn’t William Harvey – who knew of this text – see the point? That’s simple too: Harvey ‘had radically misunderstood Nardi’s argument because of a fundamental ambiguity in Latin’ – the English for the Latin semen could be either ‘semen’ or ...”

“... of the process of writing, she’s building a canvas as well as she is putting on the paint,’ James Taylor, another conquest, explained. ‘It’s never straight on.’ Mitchell’s lyrical indirection, the habit of thinking against conventional tropes, is an extension of what she calls her ‘perverse need for originality’, a manifestation of a ...”

“... women who had escaped from their owners in London, only to be recaptured, came to public attention.James Somerset, who had been brought to England from Virginia by his owner, Charles Stewart, and managed to escape and live freely for a brief period, became the subject of a test case in 1772. Was the ownership of people legal in the ‘mother ...”

“... as John Quincy Adams described it in 1823. In imitation of British freelance imperialists such as James Brooke, the ‘white rajah’ who ruled the state of Sarawak on Borneo as a private fiefdom in the mid-19th century, America produced its own brand of freebooters, including William Walker, the Tennessee doctor who ...”

“... six minors were jointly convicted of second-degree murder. Two years later, a vigilante called William Masters II shot a pair of unarmed graffiti painters, one of whom died. ‘Outraged Latino community leaders demanded Masters’s indictment for manslaughter,’ Davis reports, but the District Attorney let him go and arrested the other graffiti painter ...”

“... Rex v. Edmonds and ensuing appeal (1820, 1821), and to several Chartist cases in 1848. Father James O’Coigly, a Catholic priest, was a United Irishman who, sometimes disguised as ‘Captain Jones’ was travelling in England in the year of the Irish rebellion, as courier to the ‘Jacobin’ underground. With Arthur O’Connor and others, he was ...”

“... gave a reading at the Keynote Club in Manhattan. Kallman and another Brooklyn student, Walter James Miller, were in the audience, with Kallman sitting in the front row giving the two international pederasts the glad eye. Afterwards he and Miller went backstage. Miller was tall, blond, Anglo-Saxon and (a friend who was not a ...”

“... Hardwick recalled, ‘skinny, smoking, and he was quite surprised that I had read everything.’ William Phillips, who co-edited Partisan Review with Rahv, described her as ‘one of our most cutting minds’, ‘charming even when most devastating or malicious’. Isaiah Berlin said she was ‘much more bitchy’ than Mary McCarthy, ‘but sharper and more ...”

“... On Hoxton Square, if anyone cares to notice it, is a blue plaque for the local physician, James Parkinson, who identified and described the neurological disease that carries his name. But now, with ever increasing speed, the memory traces of market gardens, madhouses, priories, holy wells, 19th-century radicalism, are being wiped out by the new ...”

“... in his right hit him. She then saw Peach sit down, and a police constable, later identified as James Scottow, go over to him. Peach was leaning against a wall and Scottow, who said he thought Peach was hiding from the police charge, shouted at him to move on. (A police internal investigation found that, given the ‘confusion and general ...”

“... later, having published An ‘Objectivists’ Anthology in 1932, A Novelette and Other Prose by William Carlos Williams, and two books by Pound: How to Read and The Spirit of Romance. It was while the Oppens were in Europe that the word ‘Objectivist’ came into existence. Pound had foisted Zukofsky on Harriet Monroe as a guest editor of Poetry for an ...”

“... turned to the important question of whom to blame. The initial target was the director of the FBI, James Comey, who in July had refused to indict Mrs Clinton, but criticised her use of an insecure email server while she was secretary of state. A few days before the election, Comey gave notice of another possible violation only to clear her again. A more ...”