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“... oddly resembles, the tendency in 20th-century music to dislocate and re-assemble, mock and love, X-ray, devour, possess a style from the past and sometimes an actual piece or group of pieces. Out in the open with Stravinsky (after such widely-discrepant precursors as Brahms, Mahler, Debussy, Satie) this avid cannibalism has by now become a commonplace, whose ...”

“... there wasn’t any controversy: there was a crisis, for example, over the US installation of an X-ray imaging system known as CargoScan at Votkinsk in the spring of 1990: the Soviet Union was concerned that it might damage the propellant in its non-treaty-limited missiles. But rather than allow their differences to undermine the treaty, both parties continued ...”

“... which are unable to address the original chaos he delights in. In the same way he tells Plath that Robert Graves has ‘a kind of disinfected enunciation, a crumb accent no less, states everything so far under that nothing at all is heard’.In these letters his love for Plath, for her ‘ponky warmth’, is absolute; in one letter he moves from describing a ...”

“... staff and cabinet appointments (Rahm Emanuel, Timothy Geithner, Lawrence Summers, Hillary Clinton, Robert Gates et al) it was clear that Obama meant to play by the same Washington rules that created the policy disasters he inherited from George W. Bush. Obama had retreated into politics as usual. He never looked back. One did not have to be a sentimental ...”

“... 1978. Humphrey Bogart’s momentum, his Jacobean wit, is transformed by the passage of time into Robert Mitchum’s monumental disdain. Mitchum is breathless, sculptural. He moves with extreme reluctance, as if charging an excess tariff for every step. Sallis understands how it’s done, he’s been to the classes. He’s learnt how to assemble the ...”

“... of what would have happened had the time traveller not stepped on the butterfly: this is from Ray Bradbury’s immortal ‘Sound of Thunder’, but the idea is adaptable to any number of wistful daydreams – had Lincoln not been assassinated, or Bobby Kennedy – or more sombre fantasies, like Philip K. Dick’s Man in the High Castle, in which Germany ...”

“... citation, and more than happy to let the jargon-mad professors hang themselves. Thus poor Robert Nelson, author of a 1988 book on the novelist, gets mercilessly dinged for writing about Cather’s oscillation between a ‘phallocentric hegemony’ and a ‘vaginocentric’ one. (According to Nelson, as cruelly quoted by Acocella, Thea ...”

“... him the first issue of the Black Mountain Review and introduced him to the work of artists such as Robert Rauschenberg, Robert Motherwell, Cy Twombly and Ray Johnson.Opinion is divided about his appearance. ‘He thought of himself as ugly,’ a boyfriend from the early 1960s said. ‘But ...”

“... Partisan Review, the Kenyon Review and Sewanee Review, with a good deal of auto-canonising. Robert Lowell, almost by default it seemed, was ceded pride of place, the ‘most important American poet now at work’. Lowell and Randall Jarrell, roommates at Kenyon College in the 1930s, and to a lesser extent Berryman too, were big on rating and ...”

“... could give his compliments a sharper second edge, as for example in ‘To My Honoured Friend Sir Robert Howard, on His Excellent Poems’ (Howard later became his brother-in-law). Discussing Howard’s translation of Book IV of the Aeneid, Dryden says: Elisa’s griefs are so expressed by you, They are too eloquent to have been true. ‘Elisa’, as the ...”

“... at all for moral courage so that one begins to feel the portrait of Cromwell is as skewed as Robert Bolt’s (or Peter Ackroyd’s) is of More and for the same reason, both men human and therefore venial when embosomed in their respective families. Set against this massive work one’s objections seem petty, and it’s a tribute to the power of the novel ...”

“... aspire ... tight skirt, elaborately streaked and crinkled perm, overzealous attention of the sun-ray lamp, boatloads of make-up – the sort of girl who in London would be lunching on two lettuce leaves, if at all, was tucking into a plate of chips and gravy. People here ordered chips as a kind of cultural rite. ‘I’ll just have chips,’ they said, as ...”

“... Kirilov and Shatov brought suffering – unacceptable to satire – into the tale. Not a ray of comedy falls on them, and yet by a miracle, which I think is effected through the ‘redemption’ of Stepan Trofimovich, the antagonistic elements are able to co-exist, the satiric metaphor and something like a Slavophil myth of the Passion. The loosing ...”

“... their beautifully elaborated and uncomplicating meaning. The hammer of modern English metre, what Robert Graves called the smith-work of ti-tum, ti-tum, is going on during the deeper, longer oar-work of Old English, and the ear, no matter how ignorant it may be of the provenance of what it is hearing, picks up on the contest. This contest, perfectly ...”

“... as once, at least, the river has seen slaughter. It was in 1388 that Richard II’s favourite, Robert Vere, led his army floundering along this flooded valley, desperate to escape his baronial pursuers, who eventually caught up and cut most of them down a little upstream at Radcot Bridge.15 February. R. and I go down to Leicester Square at noon, the Tube ...”