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“... was a distinguished wartime Naval cryptographer at Bletchley Park. But he has no feeling for, or even interest in, operations in the field, and his essay reads like a university exam paper rather than a work of military history. He has failed to interview the survivors from among those responsible for British Intelligence there, and his apologia for this ...”

“... Moore who sang his praises, but other, very different kinds of poet too: Robert Graves, Dylan Thomas, Octavio Paz, Louis Zukofsky and Charles Olson. As did any number of critics: Edmund Wilson, Harry Levin, Jacques Barzun, Lionel Trilling, Guy Davenport. Were all of them hornswoggled, taken in by the surface polish and acrobatics of Cummings’s style ...”

“... and the Soviet Union was disinformation and had never taken place. Such was his reputation that even Maurice Oldfield was inclined to credit this as true. Again, sleuths often rely on disaffected members of the secret services who have resigned. Much of the information about the Cambridge spies has come in recent years from three such members of MI5. The ...”

“... The Whirling Eye (1920) by Thomas W. Benson and Charles S. Wolfe    A psychiatrist, visiting an insane asylum, discovers his old friend Professor Mehlman, who declares that he has been unjustly incarcerated merely because he is in love with a Venusian. Mehlman had constructed a giant telescope in the Andes to observe life on Venus ...”

“... Logorrhoea:​ Charles Olson, Robert Duncan and Robert Creeley were all afflicted with it. I only ever witnessed Duncan’s performances – free-form, extended, mostly improvised soliloquies. The one I remember best was at the poet Carl Rakosi’s house. It was many years ago, but I think he touched on Plato, Beethoven, Milton, Tom Thumb, Lysistrata, the genus Asterias (starfish) and the song ‘Penny Lane ...”

“... two families. When Graham arrives at Lecter’s cell, the good doctor wakes up: ‘Dr Lecter’s eyes are maroon and they reflect the light redly in tiny points.’ Brrrrr. Is it chilly in here, or is it me? All this happens in Red Dragon, Thomas Harris’s second novel, his first being the, in retrospect, remarkably ...”

“... It was once observed by J.B. Priestley that the literary life in England was ‘a rat-race without even a sight of the other rats’. English authors on the whole prefer to work on their own and find their friends outside the confraternity – indeed, because of this preference, there is hardly such a thing as a confraternity ...”

“... at that time his friend. What sort of man, he had asked Erasmus, was this kindred poetic spirit Thomas More, fellow-condemner of court life and author of the diverting Utopia, as well as admirably an admirer of Hutten’s own satire on monkish blankness and obscurantism, Letters from Nonentities (Epistolae Obscurorum Virorum)? Erasmus’s reply did for More ...”

“... Freud, who analysed him, said he had a ‘most gentle heart’. He was willing to reward talent even when a work didn’t take his fancy, and he rarely tried to take the credit for other people’s success. A friend described Thayer’s commitment to art as so earnest that he ‘remained insulated from the ironical comments about him’, yet he exercised ...”

“... point. She’s neat, both modern and quintessentially luxurious; dark hair pulled back into a bun, eyes like soft triangles, sweeping cheekbones, it is a sculpted head, a lukewarm, intelligent face. She might be an actress, a spy, a photographer. The woman is Djuna Barnes. What I am looking for, and can’t see, is the grotesque, the decadent, the rotten; the ...”

“... poem jumps here and there. Berryman too was jumpy, in body and mind. The movement is song-like, even dance-like, lyrical in an improvisational but coherent way. Lowell is never lyrical. Of the very few contemporaries to whom Berryman paid serious attention only Roethke has a similar ability to make his verse sing. The youthful Berryman was a splendid dancer ...”

“... David Jones, aged twenty, awaiting transfer home in July 1916 after being wounded in Mametz Wood. Even a decade later, photographs show a wary child or an understudy for an adult. Prudence Pelham, the staunchest of his extended female fellowship, described him as ‘completely unsexed’. He himself felt anomalous in the 1920s, and by the decade’s end ...”