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“... to New York, where he rejoined his Harvard friends and their friends – among them the poets Kenneth Koch, James Schuyler and Barbara Guest – becoming part of a social circle that was soon dominated by painters. In 1951 and again from 1955 until his death, O’Hara worked at the Museum of Modern Art, where he became a curator of exhibitions and a well ...”

“... Three versions of pluralism are examined, belonging respectively to Ronald S. Crane, Kenneth Burke and M.H. Abrams. Professor Booth does his best, at terrific length, to reconcile these three different pluralisms with each other, but finally they don’t seem able to settle down together except within the even bigger and better pluralism which is ...”

“... in her conception of herself. The pictorial evidence is contradictory; but it appears that as a young woman she had good features, a fine, keen, intelligent face, somewhat spoiled by prominent front teeth, which were removed when she was 40. She retained childhood memories of being rejected in favour of prettier girls; and in middle life she wrote of trying ...”

“... transported to the New World, especially the large percentage sentenced at the Old Bailey, were young, single males, as were the great mass of indentured servants who freely decided to come to America. There was, however, a significant difference. Most of the men who freely signed contracts in London possessed skills. They had been apprenticed. By ...”

“... where Ian Hamilton, editor of the New Review, was usually to be found. The suppliants, mostly young men not then long out of the universities, have very properly combined to congratulate the sage or gaffer on his 60th birthday.* Some of them got their first chance in that pub. A few of the celebrants are, or have been, English dons – John Fuller, Simon ...”

“... class of 30 12-year-old boys. Another English lesson: not Great Expectations this time, but Young Warriors by V.S. Reid. It is the first time the boys have seen the book, and there is a murmur of interest as the texts are handed out. ‘Who’s this geezer on the back?’ somebody asks. I explain that it’s a photo of the author. The ...”

“... were Jacques Barzun, R.P. Blackmur, Alfred Kazin, Lionel Trilling, Delmore Schwartz, Allen Tate, Kenneth Burke, Robert Fitzgerald, Leslie Fiedler and John Crowe Ransom – this last its founder as a school of literary criticism ‘to teach those who teach it’. Marianne Moore, in Brooklyn, had a quieter time, but was just as much in touch with them all ...”

“... Virginia, and by deliberately cultivating the impression that he was a doomed man. As one of the young women he wooed unsuccessfully in his early twenties recalled, ‘he said often that there was a mystery hanging over him he never could fathom.’ Or, as Poe himself wrote in one of his earliest tales, ‘it is evident that we are hurrying onward to some ...”

“... novelist to choose from. He could, for instance, have picked on the investigative journalist John Kenneth Turner, who travelled to Mexico in 1908 and discovered that Diaz’s wonderfully healthy economy was based on massive slavery and the slaughter of the Yaqui Indians. Turner wrote up his findings in a series of slashing articles later collected as the book ...”

“... fiend-like original in his own bosom’. (One can only guess what Steevens would have made of Kenneth Gross’s recent book, Shylock Is Shakespeare.) Malone refused to concede the point, in part because he believed he knew – given his unrivalled immersion in Shakespeare’s life and work – what Shakespeare was really like, and in part because he ...”

“... it was not as though the inner circle of his admirers was composed of dummies: Berlin, Betjeman, Kenneth Clark, John Sparrow, as well as, a little later, Noel Annan and Stuart Hampshire – all capable of the odd spot of talking themselves. But they acknowledged Bowra as their master, which was fortunate since no other terms were on offer. With the ...”

“... ultimate crime of not being Margaret Thatcher’, and he became, in the words of the late Hugo Young, ‘a permanently contingent leader’. But he was not alone. Since Major no post-Thatcher Tory has been wholeheartedly accepted throughout the party as the legitimate leader of Conservatism. The rejection of Thatcher by her purported followers marks a ...”

“... erratic and intellectually precocious. Bored at school, he read what you would expect a clever young man to read – the French symbolist poets, Stefan George, Rilke, Wedekind, Nietzsche – but he was also interested in street cries and fairground songs, whose rhythms found their way into his earliest ballads. When war broke out he was attracted by the ...”

“... on a bed together. There is only contiguity, never interaction. He greatly admired Chardin’s The Young Schoolmistress – which most would see as one of the tenderest (and most beautifully coloured) images of human interaction; Freud liked it mainly because the schoolmistress had the best-painted ear in the history of art. He admired ‘jokiness’ in a ...”

“... standards of 1889’) and at 14 became a foundation member of the Left Book Club. By 16 he was a Young Communist and soon found the intellectual discipline of Marxism ‘irresistible’. He did all the Left things. When Hitler and Stalin signed their nonaggression pact he saw the Soviet action as ‘sensible, logically defensible and indeed ...”