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“... a boa constrictor, and, among Englishmen, Lord Berners’. The presiding spirit was Oscar Wilde. Robert Ross, Wilde’s literary executor, was the keeper of the flame and the still centre of London’s homosexual subculture. When, in Pat Barker’s The Ghost Road, the bisexual Billy Prior is introduced to Ross, the first thing he registers is ‘the ...”

“... are tangled into a fence and sing a little, when the wind is high. The hammers and their moss of green felt must be long decayed, but perhaps a few keys remain scattered in a broken smile, to choke the cattle or confuse the plough.’ This surreal and glamorous image sums up the difference between Eliza Lynch and Clara, where the pianos we first see from the ...”

“... by this bench marked the completion of the final phase of its construction. Since 1568, Robert Dudley, Earl of Leicester, who had been made lord of Kenilworth in 1563, had been pouring money into the castle so it would be fit to accommodate the queen. Elizabeth visited in 1566, 1568 and 1572, but he didn’t finish his alterations until the last and ...”

“... incident occurs. Here we are close to the art of the stage conjurer: a point well made by Robert Barnard in his concise and extremely acute book. Again, over this long period of time the clue tends steadily to refine and even attenuate itself in consonance with the enhanced acuity of readers. It is no longer at all likely to be the imprint of a boot ...”

“... was incidental, part of some larger story that wasn’t going to get told. John Wayne’s film The Green Berets (1968) told another story, but it didn’t tell that one. The cluster of new films about the Iraq War is different in both respects. The war is still going on – indeed has no visible end, in spite of what everyone wants and politicians like to ...”

“... no word for understatement. She won prizes but less international recognition than her warm friend Robert Lowell, who consistently celebrated her: Dear Elizabeth, Half New-Englander, half fugitive Nova Scotian, wholly Atlantic sea-board – Unable to settle anywhere, or live Our usual roaring sublime. Elizabeth Bishop certainly never roared. In this ...”

“... I learnt that swimming naked was far nicer than in a bathing-suit – particularly in water made green by overhanging trees and wild flowers growing up to the edge of the pool, and if you were lucky a dragonfly might swoop for a drink, get too wet and need ferrying in cupped hands to the bank, as you did your very best on-your-back, legs-only stroke. She ...”

“... demanding, disorderly libraries (‘Hazlitt, Mallarmé, and twenty volumes of Balzac; Dryden and Robert Graves; Cicero and Darwin, and, between them, a brand-new copy of By Love Possessed’); they travel heavy, toting copies of ‘Die Griechischen Altertümer, Le Trésor de Sifnos, Alexander’s Path’. Their sad goings are marked by sly nods in the ...”

“... Coghill read his poems, but wasn’t very enthusiastic; Peter Jay took a photo of him in a green silk smoking jacket looking ‘just like Rupert Brooke!’; he talked about jazz with Robert Graves and about Keith Douglas with Edmund Blunden, the new professor of poetry. Poetry was both companionship and ...”

“... account of her life by Bamber Gascoigne, and then David Attenborough’s reading of two poems by Robert Frost. There appears to have been a Feddenesque delicacy and some well-placed dabs of humour to the whole affair. ‘Very Mary,’ Catherine said. The phrase ‘order of service’ isn’t Catholic. I never heard it in the chapels of my youth (we had ...”

“... to be their best and most enduring. Fulcrum also published two important early collections by Robert Duncan, Allen Ginsberg’s Ankor Wat and, most significantly, two volumes by Lorine Niedecker, North Central and My Life by Water, and George Oppen’s Collected Poetry. Of British poets, apart from Bunting, Montgomery published four collections by Roy ...”

“... as an undetermined field. Twombly studied in Boston and Lexington, and in New York, where he met Robert Rauschenberg. The two of them spent time at Black Mountain College in 1951. Twombly’s early works, and many of the later ones, make sense as an offshoot of Abstract Expressionism. But it wasn’t the openness of Kline or Pollock that he was drawn ...”

“... there at last. A new island, an uninhabited island, can fold you in, surrounding you with its green arms, crooning to you: ‘This is where to live’ – especially if you are well supplied with tent and sleeping-bag, stove and fuel, food for ten days – and so it was as we half-jumped onto the rocks from the rubber inflatable which the launch had towed ...”

“... prize of a little house ‘with its own little crease in the hillside filled with the deep green shade of pines and succulents, bamboo and yucca: the California green that can make you forget the California brown all around it’. Of all the book’s characters, Jo makes the most determined attempt to escape the pull ...”

“... than early Pink Floyd – going on to produce a few grand creative talents in their own right. Robert Wyatt is the big survivor of the Soft Machine, a Hugo Ball at full lifespan to the band’s jaunty evocations of Dada. But there was also Daevid Allen, the founder of Gong, and Kevin Ayers, an eclectic-comic figure of some talent – in many ways the ...”