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“... painters have paid too much attention to the ism and not enough to the painting,’ William Carlos Williams wrote in 1928. Something similar could be said about Williams’s own critics: since his death in 1963, attention to his theories and to his life has been getting in the way of his poems. With ...”

“... It included a short, boisterous preface by Pound. Reviewing it for Poetry in 1934, William Carlos Williams called it a blueprint for ‘a new construction’, undertaken with an ‘irreducible minimum’ of means. The icy charm of those poems, 31 in all, one per page, along with their brevity and occasionally their flat refusal to make sense, asked much of ...”

“... the war and to fix a French taint to the movement to reform a thoroughly corrupt parliament. Kenneth Johnston’s Unusual Suspects are men and women who fell foul of ‘Pitt’s determination to crush his domestic opponents’ and whose lives, careers, reputations were irrevocably damaged as a result. They were members of a brilliant generation of ...”

“... Allen Ginsberg and Louis Zukofsky (both Jewish), the Lowell of Notebook, the Orientally-minded Kenneth Rexroth and Gary Snyder on whom Cathay made such an impact, British poets as different from each other as Donald Davie and Jeremy Prynne, Objectivists like Oppen and Reznikoff, and of course the whole group of poets associated with Black Mountain College ...”

“... an appreciative mention from Vita Sackville-West in the Observer, and attracted the attention of Kenneth Rexroth, who chose to include her work in an anthology he was assembling. In the course of their correspondence Rexroth became infatuated with Levertov, even though she was 17 years younger than him and so, as a mutual friend warned him, ‘badly under ...”

“... flat on East 52nd St in 1950, the year before Schuyler’s breakdown, Schuyler met John Ashbery, Kenneth Koch and Frank O’Hara, who had been friends at Harvard. The ‘Harvard wits’, he called them. Schuyler had attended Bethany College, a small college in West Virginia affiliated with the Disciples of Christ, where he had devoted himself to bridge and ...”

“... bus who’d actually voted for him ten years earlier, and I’d done it with some exasperation. Kenneth Morgan’s over-long biography brings back all these feelings. Part of the problem is Morgan himself. He has written a long list of books about Wales, the Labour Party, Lloyd George, Wales, Jim Callaghan, Wales, the Labour Party, and just occasionally, to ...”

“... In​ 1882, the year Virginia Woolf and William Carlos Williams were born, Friedrich Nietzsche bought a typewriter, a Malling-Hansen Writing Ball. It wasn’t as good as a Remington but it was cheaper. Nietzsche was losing his eyesight, probably as a result of syphilis, and hoped the Writing Ball would help. But first he had to master touch-typing ...”

“... into a kaleidoscope with an attractive new pattern and with himself at the centre of it. In Kenneth Harris’s book of extended interviews with him, which must have been largely completed before the election and hastily updated since, Dr Owen lays emphasis on what he sees as two early betrayals of the SDP: the conversations which David Steel and I had ...”

“... In 1978, at a seminar on John Maynard Keynes held by the University of Kent, Raymond Williams talked about ‘The Significance of Bloomsbury as a Social and Cultural Group’. He accepted Leonard Woolf’s characterisation of Bloomsbury as consisting ‘of the upper levels of the professional middle class and county families, interpenetrated to a certain extent by the aristocracy’ with ‘an intricate tangle of ancient roots and tendrils stretching far and wide’ through those classes ...”

“... supervisions and classes? Or simply record – reconstruct – his talk? One exception is Raymond Williams, who did not meet him till 1961. ‘I have never known a social situation in which a group seemed so obsessed by one man,’ he remarks of Cambridge. Even Williams can describe only Leavis’s behaviour in the ...”

“... war that followed Angola’s independence from Portugal in 1975. In almost every case, as Susan Williams explains in White Malice, the US, attended by the former colonial powers, fought hard to influence the turn of events; before long, as Natalia Telepneva shows in Cold War Liberation, her account of decolonisation in Portuguese Africa, Moscow and Beijing ...”

“... as the Venus de Milo, and with a tear running down her cheek? I can only guess why Shirley Williams is carrying a copy of the News Chronicle, or why Jimmy Hill has an Arab headdress, or why Lord Home stands bat in hand before a broken wicket. Craig Brown says that in his caricatures Boxer mixed ‘the base and the suave’, but there is not a lot of ...”

“... America. He ignored also Crane’s metrical strictness, and under the influence of William Carlos Williams looked for ‘the open form ... and variable breath-stop length for verse measurement, that enabled him to write “Howl”.’ He fell in love with Kerouac but did not dare to make a sexual approach, and had his first experience with a forty-year-old ...”

“... hurrying narrator’s voice – ‘very shortly’ – promising us the delusive charms of Jane Williams, the guitar, the boat and Casa Magni by the sea. Everything is alive, swift, detailed, full of feeling. Again, it is clear what we will miss: any time to reflect, any chance to see the larger pattern, any real opportunity to enter into the speculative ...”