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“... linked to its strengths, both of which are inherent in the Jefe Máximo’s style of rule. Thomas Paterson’s vivid account of the 1955-8 insurrection properly focuses on the ‘hegemonic presumption’ of US policy-makers, and on Castro’s skill at mobilising anti-yanqui feeling to cement his regime. The clash of these two nationalisms, which ...”

“... next century, the idea of the bard became linked to Homeric epic. By 1735 the Aberdeen philosopher Thomas Blackwell was writing that Homer was a ‘stroling indigent Bard’. Robert Burns liked that idea. In ‘Love and Liberty’ a bard sings alongside prostitutes and tinkers, and pronounces himself ‘Homer like’. Burns’s footnote (Burns enjoyed ...”

“... Death and the sun are not to be looked at in the face. Maxims, La Rochefoucauld Don Paterson and I were crossing the Wolfe Tone Bridge in Galway contemplating Thomas Crapper. This was at early o’clock in the morning on our way back from an awful curry at the only Indian restaurant open in Galway in the wee hours ...”

“... that follow were indeed first spoken by Democritus. In his 1989 book on plagiarism, Stolen Words, Thomas Mallon excoriated the academic special pleading that elevated Sterne and Coleridge from literary shoplifters into masters of bricolage and intertextuality. Their cases are analysed along with that of the Victorian novelist Charles Reade, and the American ...”

“... American idiom’ everywhere else. His businessman father, of English descent, grew up in St Thomas in the Virgin Islands; his mother, a frustrated painter, came from Puerto Rico. After high school in Switzerland and New York City, Williams took a degree in medicine at the University of Pennsylvania, where he met Hilda Doolittle (later H.D.) and ...”

“... a sculptor and polo player who married an heiress to one of the great American fortunes; and Thomas Hitchcock, the most famous polo player in America, just back from a year at Oxford courtesy of the US Army. (Jay Gatsby enjoyed the same.) Rumsey was killed near Great Neck when he was thrown from an open roadster the day after Fitzgerald arrived in New ...”

“... killed off by the war the vacuum was filled by the extravagant romanticism associated with Dylan Thomas, George Barker and Edith Sitwell. Less than a decade later, with those roses seen as over-blown, Robert Conquest was deploring ‘the omission of the necessary intellectual component from poetry’, gathering several disparate writers under one ...”

“... in which Johnson was unafraid to publish opinions at variance with his own. His friend Samuel Paterson’s Joineriana was a miscellany of anecdotes, aphorisms and his own tedious pensées, including his view of homosexuality as a ‘detestable and unmanly lust’. This was not an unusual position at that date, but ...”

“... salt. Kleinzahler may here seem to assume the all-registering consciousness of the Williams of Paterson, but Williams felt compelled to develop some kind of representative – even epic – meaning out of Paterson’s history, while Kleinzahler is at leisure to savour the rank effluents contaminating the river as ...”

“... the Lights and Shadows o’ Scottish Death want relief – though, to be sure, poor Peggy Paterson, that Unfortunate, broke in a little on the uniformity; and sae did Daft Jamie: for whilk last murder, without ony impiety, ane may venture to say, the Devil is at this moment ruggin that Burke out o’ hell-fire wi’ a three-pronged fork, and then in ...”

“... Poets of Great Britain), Robert Anderson (Complete Edition of the Poets of Great Britain) and Thomas Campbell (Specimens of the British Poets) – Bucknell doesn’t comment on the way they promoted through their works’ titles a ‘British’ culture, rather than one badged as ‘English’. In the wake of Yeats’s Book of Irish Verse (first published ...”

“... shows all four Doctorow facets. The bulk of the narrative takes place in 1936. The hero is Joe of Paterson, also known as Joseph Korzeniowski (the choice of Conrad’s Polish name evidently has some tricksy significance). An 18-year-old hobo victim of the Great Depression, Joe first takes up work in a freak show – partly for ideological reasons: ‘I had to ...”

“... a chronologically arranged selection of Porter’s poems deftly edited by Sean O’Brien and Don Paterson, deals with his Scottish Australian ancestry, and with despair-haunted, hard-drinking, church-building men who have ‘no life but the marking-time of work’. Probably with Porter’s father’s garden in mind, it ends with an image of ‘country ...”

“... Larkin, and thus to any mainstream English poet of the past few decades. (It’s notable that Don Paterson, for example, spends a significant amount of energy positioning his own practice in relation to Prynne’s.) Acceptance, however unlikely it once seemed, has therefore arrived. (I’d like to think that a moment in 2013, when Prynne could be seen ...”

“... Similarly, it is hard not to detect the verdict of moral absurdity in his account of R.S. Thomas as ‘primarily a religious poet, tormented by a sense of God’s absence, and berating his parishioners for using refrigerators, washing machines, and other modern evils’, or of air-headedness in his remark that Mrs Yeats’s ability to hear spirit ...”