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“... the best of them began to publish – John James, Chris Torrance, Lee Harwood, Andrew Crozier, Peter Riley, J.H. Prynne, Michael Haslam, Douglas Oliver, Barry MacSweeney, Denise Riley – they must nonetheless wonder, from time to time, whether theirs is a case of having missed the boat which would only have been worth catching if they’d been on it in ...”

“... at the famous Albert Hall ‘Wholly Communion’ readings on 11 June 1965. I’d watched the Peter Whitehead video. American poets in those days, with their crisper sense of history and occasion, wore suits and ties. I’d read the free-wheeling interviews in fugitive magazines, such as Arthur and Kit Knight’s The Beat Diary. I’d clocked Corso, along ...”

“... natural.’ The cockeyed-ness is evident when you look at the diaries of Orton’s friend Kenneth Williams, who was happy to come to Morocco but whose diaries blench at the mere thought of liberated sex: Thursday, 26 September 1963: The Denning Report on the Profumo-Ward case is out. Apparently it says that well-known actors were at these filthy parties. It ...”

“... stalemate filled with rumours, conspiracy theories: drugs, communists, the IRA, the Angry Brigade, Peter Hain. ‘The demons proliferate … The enemy is lurking everywhere. He – or increasingly she – is behind everything … Nevertheless, in its varying and protean forms, official society – the state, the political leadership, the opinion leaders, the ...”

“... sense that Jarrell made his mark. Or perhaps it was the wit that devastated. Of William Carlos Williams he said that ‘even his good critical remarks sound as if they had been made by Henry Ford’; of Edith Sitwell’s then fashionable poems that they ‘sound as if Madame Blavatsky had written them for a Society of Latterday Druids’. In a sonnet ...”

“... with colleagues like Cecil Sharp (whose ideas about folk-song were later endorsed by Vaughan Williams) were superficially about Grainger’s pioneering use of the phonograph. But Sharp’s hard-nosed rejection of the infernal machine as the only means of accurately transcribing folk-song had less to do with practicalities (Grainger’s transcriptions ...”

“... nowhere, but emerged in very specific economic conditions. Russell’s friend and fellow musician Peter Gordon recalls the mutual support that sustained their circle of friends in late-1970s New York: ‘We used to joke that the same $50 got passed back and forth between us. There was no dividing line between money and the community.’ New York had a ...”

“... which struggled to accommodate South African material in the dramatic forms supplied by Tennessee Williams, Clifford Odets, Eugene O’Neill and Arthur Miller, Fugard found what he needed in Camus’s treatment of Algeria: ‘when I first encountered the articulation of that almost pagan, sensual life lived out in the sun, next to a sea, with warm rocks ...”

“... Russell on the evolution of Pym’s character and Morrill on Pym’s relations with backwoods MPs; Peter Thomas on Court and country cultures) is intelligently deployed, but not always searchingly tested against the events Mr Fletcher describes. And Mr Fletcher is careful to warn us that ‘although this book contains a new narrative it is in no sense an ...”

“... blames on men. And she is not alone. An anonymous hand, she reports, has added to the index of Williams Obstetrics (1980) the following entry: ‘Chauvinism, male, voluminous amounts, pages 1-1102.’ If gravid women have suffered at the hands of medical science, midwives have fared even worse. ‘All wickedness is but little to the wickedness of a ...”

“... poem for him: ‘Marcel, Marcel, I Love You Like Hell, Marcel.’) She disgusted William Carlos Williams; she terrified Wallace Stevens. She wore cancelled postage stamps on her cheeks as beauty spots, and dressed in outfits one would think Barnes had invented had they not been confirmed by other people’s accounts (Herring is very good on this). Her hair ...”

“... the worst possible choice), whose report was published in March. Separately, a panel headed by Sir Peter Gross, a former commercial lawyer and appeal judge, is reporting on the future of the Human Rights Act, despite the fact that the sustained political assaults on the act and the convention, which were designed to get the UK excluded from the EU, became an ...”

“... SDP? The latter boasted a few well-known and intelligent social democrats – Roy Jenkins, Shirley Williams, David Owen, Peter Jenkins and Polly Toynbee – but they were still destroyed by the electoral system and had to stave off obscurity by a political transplant, merging with the Liberals, an experiment that ended in ...”

“... and outrageously reactionary fantasist at the Daily Telegraph, who wrote under the pseudonym Peter Simple. Yet Wharton’s attempts to ridicule the enemies of Unionism were funny precisely because they drew on received assumptions about both Unionists and liberals. Among the most memorable creations in his gallery of bien-pensant absurdity was the trendy ...”

“... enough to sustain more than three hundred closely printed pages of dutiful third-person narrative. Peter Jernigan is better company on the page, largely because in the novel named after him he tells his own story. He’s writing, he indicates early on, in an institution of some kind – it turns out to be a drying-out facility – and has no memory of being ...”