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“... E.E. Cummings​ is the sort of poet one loves at the age of 17 and finds unbearably mawkish and vacuous as an adult. But in the mid-20th century he was the most popular poet in the United States after Robert Frost, and from early in his career, among the most admired by writers and critics. It wasn’t just the usual modernist suspects like Pound, Williams, Stevens and Marianne Moore who sang his praises, but other, very different kinds of poet too: Robert Graves, Dylan Thomas, Octavio Paz, Louis Zukofsky and Charles Olson ...”

“... be hunting for a bookshop: she shows him the way to it and there he finds, as if by chance, E.E. Cummings’s Collected Poems, which he insists on buying for her. Putting her into a taxi he tells her, twice, to be sure to read the poem on page 112, which he says makes him think of her. Later we see her lying on a bed with the book, and hear ...”

“... The poet E.E. Cummings was born with what are called all the advantages, or with enough of them. It was in Cambridge, Massachusetts, in ‘a huge, three-storied, many-roomed structure with 13 fire-places… not far from Harvard Yard’. His mother was so considerate of her son’s future biographer that she recorded hour by hour the stages of her labour ...”

“... emblematic: an old man, his daughter, a young man, a chorus of girls, a boy child. There is even an off-stage cameo guest appearance by Alexandra’s ex-husband, the Communist Granofsky. (‘Probably boring the Cubans to death this very minute,’ opines her father.) As in the News of the World, the whole of human life is here, and, indeed, many of ...”

“... wave exhibits a mesh of overlapping features. The analysis of a word such as rail reveals an ever-changing pattern of movement, with no obvious sound boundaries. None has sought more tenaciously and persuasively than Roman Jakobson to establish another (universal) level of analysis which would correspond more faithfully to the way in which we perceive ...”

“... night & day ‘all poor little peoples that want to be free just trust in the u s a’ e.e. cummings, ‘Thanksgiving (1956)’ We in Iraq are losing our minds. War does that to people, even to us in the North who have yet to see one. All that we have observed are B52s roaring through the skies to bomb cities south of ...”

“... you used to know back home, you begin to run out of money, and you can’t understand why you ever came here in the first place . . . it’s too late. You’re stranded.’ Ireland does kindle feelings of hope and opportunity for Sansom, feelings which he associates with his baby. He quotes William Trevor – ‘The map of Ireland is not unlike a sleeping ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... now it was a corpse, a dry leaf in the herbarium of ideas, a dead notion, an antiquated word.’ Even Keetenheuve’s only firm belief, in pacifism, comes into conflict with the way politics works. Before an important debate on remilitarisation in which he is due to address the Bundestag, he is taken to one side by the Party leader, who ‘reminds’ him ...”

“... with, or endured through, the appalling This Side of Paradise to the triumph of Gatsby. Stevens, Cummings, Pound, Crane, Dos Passos: their merits and possibilities of development were noted at an early stage in their careers. For two decades or a little more, Wilson was almost infallibly discerning about recent American writers, about their British ...”

“... A.J. Ayer, says Ben Rogers, had a ‘pampered upbringing, even by Edwardian standards’. He suffered much at prep school, then went to Eton, where he suffered less and got over it. The next move, to Christ Church, was painless. Oxford gave him Gilbert Ryle as his tutor and appointed him to a lectureship before he graduated ...”

“... there was anything reprehensible in his behaviour. ‘Oh no, sir! Of course not, sir.’ Did I ever contemplate the possibility, he continued, that he was some sort of paederast (a word which he pronounced, probably correctly, ‘piederast’). ‘Oh, my goodness no, sir,’ I stammered, quite honestly, since I had not the remotest idea what paederast ...”

“... who can, so to speak, make the right noises. And while the questions asked are sarcastic, even angry, the conclusion offers a regretful confession: ‘More than your shell-like, your clack applause/What bothers is whether you’ll boo me if I balls . . .’ Nagra’s parents came to the UK from the Punjab in the 1950s. His autobiographical pieces ...”

“... anthology was published, the names of contributors included Pound, William Carlos Williams, E.E. Cummings, Wallace Stevens and Marianne Moore. For 35 years Pound advised, instructed, cajoled, abused, while Laughlin for the most part acted on the good advice, ignored the bad, and behaved with a degree of patrician independence proper to a man who was able to ...”