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“... Ginsberg often claims to have issued indirectly from Whitman’s and directly from William Carlos Williams’s overcoat: but Williams’s presence of mind in language is quite different from Ginsberg’s, and his poems are far more fully composed. Most of Ginsberg’s poems document his time and collapse into it. They ...”

“... truth, it seems both to Murdoch’s husband, John Bayley (‘Puss’), and to her biographer, Peter Conradi, that it did so here. In their view Murdoch’s advancing illness, crumbling away language and reason, laid bare in her an essential impulse toward love. As words broke up, it was the vocabulary of love and delight that survived the longest. When ...”

“... first time out of the box,’ he said, ‘the Grammy, the Emmy, the Tony, the Oscar.’ Tennessee Williams wrote that ‘a giddy God … endowed her with an instrument that even she does not fully understand,’ and Pauline Kael took every opportunity to lionise her ‘protean, volatile talent’. At the end of her first gig in Los Angeles, at the Cocoanut ...”

“... but these days not permitted. 20 May. Nick Hytner is in the second week of rehearsals of Tennessee Williams’s Orpheus Descending at the Donmar. We chat in Maggie Smith’s dressing-room in the interval of The Lady in the Van, Maggie saying that Tennessee Williams had a distinctive laugh and when she was playing Hedda ...”

“... helped establish the reputations of James Fenton and Craig Raine; poems by Heaney and Lowell; and Peter Porter’s ‘An Australian Garden’, which counts among his best things. Of the short stories, ‘Solid Geometry’ is a reminder that TNR played host to Ian McEwan when he was still regarded as a fairly nerve-wracking guest. But the essays are the chief ...”

“... to place and pin them down in a way that could not be done with real American poets – Carlos Williams, Wallace Stevens, John Ashbery. She even places Lowell inside a critical trope. ‘The New Critical doctrine that every poem is a little drama built around a central paradox is ... in the very fabric of their lives ... especially Lowell, whose life is ...”

“... read this one by Mariani, a serial biographer of poets (he has notched already, among Americans, Williams, Crane, Lowell and Berryman), I don’t feel much the better for it. I got more, qua biography, from the bare bones of the 11-page chronology in the Library of America edition of Stevens; or from the brisk 15-page sketch called ‘Wallace Stevens: A ...”

“... as it was disdainful of the lower orders. Yet, nearly a year before Look Back in Anger, Peter Hall directed another play with one set and five characters, who perform music-hall turns, make long speeches and take off their trousers; in which nothing much happens, key elements of the first half are echoed in the second, there is a crucial off-stage ...”

“... barren-spirited fellow … a property’. From this stems a still familiar, theatrical sense. Peter Quince, preparing the rude mechanicals’ show in A Midsummer Night’s Dream, says: ‘I will draw a bill of properties.’ Maus does not entirely ignore theatrical properties. She makes the shrewd point that there is often a tight fit between subject and ...”

“... I (1649), Cromwell was goaded to ever greater wickedness by the New Model Army chaplain Hugh Peter, his sidekick ‘i’the Machiavilian world’: the future Lord Protector’s outsize red toper’s nose, a staple of royalist humour, eventually takes on celestial dimensions as a comet portending Charles’s doom. Cromwell’s avowed republicanism masks ...”

“... community-based solidarities were replaced by the more atomised, consumerist lifestyles Raymond Williams called ‘mobile privatisation’. That this benefited the SNP rather than the Conservatives has been accounted for in various ways: the improving organisational capacity of the SNP during the 1960s; the discovery of North Sea oil; or David McCrone and ...”

“... second time I saw him must have been a few years later at the Mermaid Theatre at a performance of Peter Luke’s play Hadrian VII with Alec McCowen. Then it was his characteristic walk that I noticed: he tripped down the aisle after the designer, Gladys Calthrop, his hands, fingers pressed together, half slipped into his trouser pockets ...”

“... though odd, could ‘write wonderfully about the external, everyday world’; and William Carlos Williams, busy writing Paterson, is admired for his practice of going to the park on Sundays where he ‘watched what people did and made it part of the poem’. It is the great pleasure of encountering ancient Chinese poetry in Arthur Waley’s versions that ...”

“... that playwright and director should never correspond. The text is full of letters from Wesker to Peter Hall, from John Dexter to Wesker and from Wesker to anyone who would listen. The last letters I wrote concerning a production of one of my plays was in 1977, when I tried, with the permission of the director, to change the performance of one of the actors ...”

“... gone to heaven? Is he playing a game on his PC?On the voice-over to the first Fellowship trailer, Peter Jackson, who directed the movie, portends: ‘The technology has caught up with the incredible imagination that Tolkien injected into that story of his. And so, this is the time.’ Of the many strange things there are to observe about Tolkien, the way his ...”