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“... and it is perfectly possible to do so – one can hardly question their integrity. The title of James Simmons’s new collection is taken from Juno and the paycock, where Juno, giving off about her husband’s waywardness, remarks: ‘And constantly singing, no less, when he ought to be always on his knees offering up a novena for a ...”

“... as part of a series that included Seamus Deane, Michael Longley, Derek Mahon, Stewart Parker, James Simmons, and several other Northern Irish poets whose voices were beginning to raise themselves in the mid-Sixties. To hear John Carey now, almost a quarter of a century later, go farther still along that road of praise is consequently all the more ...”

“... display combining maximum publicity with the minimum risk to themselves. The Ulster poet James Simmons has captured this. Familiar things you might brush against or tread upon in the daily round were glistening red with the slaughter the hero caused, though he had gone. By proxy his bomb exploded, his valour shone. That mythic scale, those ...”

“... from the heart. Not that I believe her: she learned much white magic, that included. Much of James Simmons’s From the Irish is accomplished doggerel: it seems to ask to be set to music for The Dubliners or The Wolfe Tones and sung in a pub in Howth. His persona is that of the honest Ulsterman, ‘The Poet’s Breastplate’ something to be beaten ...”

“... and was given a new job running a team investigating mail theft. In June 1975 he arrested Stephen Simmons and two others for stealing mailbags from a wagon in Clapham Goods Yard. Simmons and two friends had been out for the evening and were in his car when Ridgewell and two other BTP officers pulled them over. ‘When I was ...”

“... Keats, he fused genres and wrote verse epistles. There are feisty examples addressed to the poets James Simmons (with whom relations became strained) and Michael Foley. His best-known exercise in this mode is ‘An Open Letter’, which was published as a Field Day pamphlet in 1983. Mildly protesting about the appearance of the word ‘British’ in the ...”

“... Alexander Cohen, Princess Elizabeth of Yugoslavia, Sir John Gielgud, Hugh Griffiths, Joseph Losey, James Mason, Vincente Minnelli, Mike Nichols, Rachel Roberts, Daphne Rye, Jean Simmons, and three of his wives, Sybil Christopher, Elizabeth Taylor and Susan Hunt. I particularly enjoyed the parenthesis Mr Ferris appended to ...”

“... for ‘swashbuckling’ entrepreneurs, especially ones with Northern accents. When she first met James Hanson, his gentle Yorkshire lilt fascinated her almost as much as his millions. She assumed, as Harold Wilson had several years previously, that Hanson was typical of the self-made man, the hard-working puritan who started at the bottom and worked twenty ...”

“... president, Daryl Morey, whose basketball god isn’t Michael Jordan but the efficiency-hunting James Harden (who has never won a championship). At the other are journalists like Bill Simmons, who calls himself a ‘narrative guy’. There are also people in the middle. The writer and podcaster Zach Lowe, for ...”

“... In 1905 a British journalist called James Dodds Henry travelled to Baku, an enclave on the southern frontier of the Russian Empire that had recently become the centre of the world oil industry. ‘If oil is king, Baku is its throne,’ he wrote in Baku: An Eventful History. But the Russian industry was even then beginning a precipitous decline following a series of crippling strikes in the oilfields led by a young Joseph Stalin, and rebellion was spreading across the Caucasus ...”

“... most influential and consequential began with the demand made in 2003 by Brown University’s Ruth Simmons, the first president of an Ivy League school of African descent, to ‘tell the truth in all its complexity’. Institutional peer pressure comes into play as such studies become unexceptional. Increasingly, credit now accrues to institutions that uncover ...”

“... the modern age, via Yeats, Synge, Francis Ledwidge, Padraig Colum and one or two others: no Joyce, James Stephens, Joseph Campbell, F.R. Higgins, Donagh MacDonagh or W.R. Rodgers. It’s hard not to feel that John Montague’s Faber Book of Irish Verse of 1974 offers a rather more satisfactory selection from the middle part of this century. Kinsella is at ...”

“... without limit, and, lacking the certainty of a completed thing, will never entirely disappoint. James Agee had a fortunate career on the face of it, as a New York freelance for almost two decades and then as a screenwriter. One of the large talents of American writing in the 1940s, Agee was a Southerner, from Knoxville, Tennessee, who came North, stayed and ...”

“... independent world of language – ‘random likenesses thrown out by our lexical cosmos’, in James Wood’s definition, part of ‘the delicious surplus of life’. Lamb’s own definition is thata pun is not bound by the laws which limit nicer wit. It is a pistol let off at the ear; not a feather to tickle the intellect. It is an antic which does not ...”

“... of the judiciary. On the occasion of his retirement as Recorder of London in July 1990, Sir James Miskin gave a television interview to the BBC. ‘That was a mad decision, was it not?’ he said of the Court of Appeal’s judgment in the Guildford case. ‘They didn’t give any thought to the fact that three years after it had happened there was a ...”