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“... true, and much more interesting, to say that she was born after it. The postwar transition from smart Hollywood to stupid Hollywood gets us into the area of all the socio-political implications DiBattista doesn’t deal with, or at any rate hasn’t yet dealt with for publication. The sooner she does, the better. Film history can do without a treatise on ...”

“... incorporated is winning. It is a poem on first name terms with tradition: ‘Will Blake’, ‘Kit Smart’, ‘Bert Brecht’, ‘Alun’ (Lewis), ‘Gerard’ (Hopkins) – and my favourite, ‘old Malc’, the composer Malcolm Arnold. (Did anyone call him that in his own lifetime?) Sometimes you have a clue: ‘Who say “cordiality responsible for such ...”

“... play a few times.’ Two of the better books written about him, Robert Johnson: Lost and Found by Barry Lee Pearson and Bill McCulloch (2003), and Escaping the Delta: Robert Johnson and the Invention of the Blues by Elijah Wald (2004), attempt to untangle the tall tales and lies.Johnson used to be seen as a ‘primitive’, his raw experience unmediated by ...”

“... were 267 shows on Broadway. The cultural mood was buoyant. Porter’s lyrics were no longer ‘too smart’ or too raffish for the cosmopolitan public.In its lavishness, the American musical traditionally made a myth of abundance – plenty in cap and bells. In the playful elegance of his word hoard, his proliferating wit and the lushness of his ...”

“... towards the end of Auden’s life. The young man was Edward Mendelson. Auden went on to do a very smart thing: he made Mendelson his executor, thereby appointing an intelligent, ambitious and wholly committed young professional scholar to oversee his posthumous fortunes. In the often tragicomic panoply of literary estates and executorships, this stands out as ...”

“... consummated. There is all the difference between this kind of effect and those that are sought by Barry Cornwall in his ‘dramatic fragments’, a reading of which in French had given Pushkin his model. Very much in the spirit of the age, Cornwall had sought to wring every ounce of romantic melodrama out of the situations he treated. Pushkin does just the ...”

“... various accounts of the poem’s reception, a bizarre compilation of ‘sources’ ranging through Smart and Shelley to Kurt Schwitters and Lorca, much of Ginsberg’s correspondence from the mid-Fifties, and a history of Howl’s ludicrous trial for obscenity in the San Francisco courts – the best the prosecution could muster was a private English tutor ...”

“... to brood in a fantastical way on the matter, unburdening himself at length to two young reporters, Barry Penrose and Roger Courtiour. It was the first sign that Wilson’s mental powers were flagging. ‘I see myself as the big fat spider in the corner of the room,’ he told them: Sometimes I speak when I’m asleep. You should both listen. Occasionally when ...”

“... is also the red-neck barricaded inside his obsession, scanning the horizon for the cultural smart-arses, the liberal intellectual spoilsports, the neurasthenic pedants, the sick-heads who want to turn off the heavenly choirs for just a bit of morbid peace and quiet.I scoff at Lanza, but I see myself reflected in his crazy encomia, gesticulating, as it ...”

“... He believed that these deceptions were necessary ploys to defeat the Republican candidate, Senator Barry Goldwater, who wanted to use nuclear weapons against Vietnam and China. In mid-1965, the legendary Major-General Edward Lansdale – ‘legendary’ for having thoroughly militarised the Philippine Government in the name of ‘counterinsurgency’ – was ...”

“... an education beyond his two years at Fordham and as a transfer student at Wharton (‘I’m a smart person. I went to the Wharton School of Finance’), it was from his guide through the circles of the Inferno, who conducted masterclasses in malice. Trump was an apt pupil in aggression. ‘I don’t think I got that from Roy at all,’ Trump told the ...”

“... on the schooldays, Amis on Larkin as an undergraduate, Charles Monteith on publishing Larkin, Barry Bloomfield and Douglas Dunn on Larkin the librarian, and others) neatly circumambulates the poet, who has made it clear that in a sense life began for him when the good poetry began, at 20 or even 30, and the ‘Toads’ poems probably say as much as one ...”

“... also mastered the rubbish racket, compulsively scavenging, trawling, sweeping up: transforming, by smart curation, the unrequired into the essential. They were addicts of entropy. They modelled junk heaps and projected silhouettes on gallery walls. The shadows, miraculously, evolved into self-portraits. All the grunge traces of the embattled city were waiting ...”

“... too and so gets the audience going. Their arrival at the theatre comes shortly after that of Barry Manilow, who is puzzled to find press and paparazzi abruptly deserting him as they go in pursuit of grander quarry. The Prince is very enthusiastic about the play when he goes round afterwards, though I’d have thought the chances of him persuading his ...”

“... strategy for 1964 was to present himself as a frustrated pacifist and his Republican opponent, Barry Goldwater, as an implacable warmonger. This had some basis in fact: Johnson had inherited ‘that bitch of a war’ and was far more interested in the Great Society, his enlightened domestic programme. He therefore sought a decisive outcome before the next ...”