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“... in 1974 and unambiguously announced in 1988. Yet despite these and other blunders Friedland and Hecht are usually fair, and their book, based on many interviews conducted over a period of years, contains much fascinating material. They are especially good on the fast increasing number of Orthodox Jews in Jerusalem. The founder of political Zionism, Theodor ...”

“... Anthony Hecht​ never changed. His poems, first and last, look as if they’ve been measured, cut and stitched on Savile Row. His first book, A Summoning of Stones (1954), displayed a glutton’s appetite for abstraction and the fastidiousness that marked much of his work thereafter:We may consider every cloud a lakeTransmogrified, its character unselfed,At once a whale and a white wedding cakeBellowed into conspicuous ectoplasm ...”

“... but none in a way that is easy to interpret. Perhaps the very act of bombing from a plane – what Richard Eberhart called ‘The Fury of Aerial Bombardment’, the gap between, in J.M. Synge’s phrase, ‘a gallous story and a dirty deed’ – made it impossible for anyone, including Yeats in ‘An Irish Airman Foresees His Death’, a poem which seems to ...”

“... poems. His work exhibits little of the ostentatious virtuosity of better-known formalists such as Richard Wilbur and Anthony Hecht, with whom he is so often, and rather unfortunately, grouped. Rather, Justice’s poems delicately induce the hypnotic state that Bishop described as her artistic ideal in a letter to Anne ...”

“... The most interesting book of first poems in many years’, Richard Howard proclaimed in 1981. James Merrill, John Hollander and John Ashbery spoke in similarly emphatic terms, while Anthony Hecht saluted an ‘extraordinarily fine’ debut and Harold Bloom hailed the arrival of a great original ...”

“... is very spotty. None of the following poets, all born before 1939, gets in: Ammons, Ashbery, Dorn, Hecht, Hollander, Zukofsky. Moby-Dick, here described as an ‘epic tragedy’, is summarised in about half the space devoted to Humphrey Clinker. Melville, like Hawthorne, gets the same wordage as Day-Lewis and a lot less than Maugham. From Australia we have ...”

“... held court alone, as Syberberg’s chilling cinematic portrait of her attests. Hitler and Richard Strauss, Toscanini and Houston Stewart Chamberlain came there, as well as a whole host of lesser figures, sycophants, geniuses, philosophers, charlatans, and professional Wagnerians of every stripe and calibre.One says all this about the bewildering ...”

“... exposé of the curse of celebrity, and one of the many books that Monroe owned. According to Ben Hecht, Monroe said that Steffens’s autobiography excited her ‘more than any other book I had read’. She was excited by it at the exact moment when the world, for very different reasons, was about to be excited by her, when she was on the verge of gaining ...”

“... The Cradle Will Rock and attaches suitable significance to Welles’s 1941 Broadway staging of Richard Wright’s Native Son, which was no less daring than Citizen Kane. In any case, it would be impossible to ignore politics when writing about Welles’s wartime activities, and especially the ill-fated government-subsidised documentary It’s All True, the ...”

“... semitic peoples’, as Magnes called it, though he too expected large-scale Jewish immigration. Richard Crossman, who was a member of the commission, concluded that Magnes ‘represented nothing real in Palestine’. This was sadly confirmed by Hourani’s saying that a binational state could work only ‘if a certain spirit of co-operation and trust exists ...”