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“... and purist, a model of the poem as a hallowed speech-act, less likely to express itself in light verse than lyric, more likely to be let down by insensitivity than intensity. If Lowell and Alvarez influenced Hamilton’s sense of what comprised his natural subject-matter (love, marital tension, suicide, madness and the whole thing there), his ...”

“... and adapting them for the silver screen. As the song says: ‘Go out and try your luck/You may be Donald Duck/Hooray for Hollywood.’ America had always been a percentage play, and Hollywood was the fabulous embodiment of the nation’s faith in pluck and luck. To a society that fancied itself a Redeemer Nation, the bonanza of stars, paydays and lush life ...”

“... order – Wilfrid Sellars, J.J.C. Smart, David Armstrong, Hilary Putnam, Jerry Fodor, Donald Davidson, Ruth Millikan, Patricia and Paul Churchland – one gets a clear sense of a developing consensus. There is increasing agreement about which moves will and won’t work, which strategies are dead and which still alive. Bad questions have been ...”

“... dream of urban ruin. I stopped one night in front of the Ferragamo shoe-shop on Fifth Avenue. The light from the shop was so strong it seemed like daylight spilling over the pavement. I felt drenched in the uncanny whiteness. And there in the window, draped on transparent mannequins or laid on silver boxes, were some of the dazzling relics of the late Marilyn ...”

“... of incipient talent – his classmates included Frank O’Hara, Kenneth Koch, John Ashbery and Donald Hall – Creeley felt discouraged and alone. ‘My eager thirst for knowledge, almost Jude-the-Obscurian in its innocence, was all but shut down by the sardonic stance of my elders,’ he recalled. He left college in 1944 for non-combatant service, driving ...”

“... by a distant prompting, I looked over the gunwale and saw beneath the surface a luminous room, a light-filled grave, saw for the first time the one clear place given to us when we are alone. Soliciting comparison with Thoreau on Walden pond, and Wordsworth o’er the side of his slow-moving boat, this composes in advance an MLA paper on ‘Strand and the ...”

“... post; back would come a list of inquiries from some studious editor. Were dates accurate, in the light of the latest research? Later, proofs would arrive, rewritten to fit in with house-style (as laid down in the Little Brown Book, constantly revised), sometimes to an infuriating extent. Were your changes really necessary, oh editors? Time will tell. It is a ...”

“... and chronicled the resulting ‘devastation’: his incompetence at bed-making, his inability to light the oven, the misery of his solitary meals. In the middle of reading one such bulletin, I rang the Taylors’ home to take his proof marks. Eva Taylor answered the phone: she was home and she was better. What had hospital been like? ‘Very interesting. But ...”

“... for the intending biographer of Palmerston. He was born before the American constitution saw the light, and lived to see the Great Republic’s civil war: among statesmen of the first rank, only Gladstone and Churchill have exceeded his elephantine span as an MP, but he surpassed them both in the number of years he held office. For some of his public ...”

“... Stefan Collini has made his reputation as the historian of late 19th-century sociological thought. Donald Winch has long been known for path-breaking studies of the Smithian and Keynesian epochs. John Burrow’s elegant anatomy of the evolutionary paradigm in Victorian Britain has recently been succeeded by a rightfully acclaimed historiographical work. Though ...”

“... the sensitivities of the tabloids. In America, as Brown points out, ‘no president … except Donald Trump … would grant access to the editor of the National Enquirer.’The Blair/Campbell secular benediction ‘the People’s Princess’ was surprisingly more than a slogan: Diana pre-empted the media, the conduit to the people. She got over being ...”

“... US, Europe and South America with a medley of scenes from Shakespeare. ‘His voice was quiet,’ Donald Spoto writes in his new study of the Redgrave family, but still expressive, and his gait often unsteady, but audiences seemed to provide him with a shot of adrenalin, and spectators were invariably impressed by the presence of Sir Michael Redgrave, still ...”

“... himself peculiarly bad at managing his own political career cannot alter the fact that he had, as Donald Macintyre makes clear, an instinctive grasp of the dynamics of the new media-led democracy, a skill certainly needed to pull off the Houdini-like feat of rescuing Labour from the state to which it had sunk in the early 1980s. But far more serious than New ...”

“... one supermarket trolley, six chandeliers, seven TV sets, ten bicycles, and ‘a low-calorie Cessna light aircraft which he ate in Caracas, Venezuela’. There is a picture of the master at work, his swivelled eye and loony rictus suggesting that he has lately been at the Castrol Multigrade, robustly tucking into a bicycle wheel. This procedure seems to be ...”

“... first Wimbledon champion ever to wear shorts.’ Perhaps in deference to long trousers, he makes Donald Budge his tennis hero. He speaks well (perhaps in deference to his first name) of Budge Patty, but he is in the main more impressed by victorious than by winning players. Yet even his string of amateur victories does not redeem Fred Perry, whom Mr Kramer ...”