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“... Robert Lowell​ has a poem called ‘Picture in The Literary Life, a Scrapbook’ which begins:A mag photo, I before I was I, or my books –a listener … A cheekbone gumballs out my cheek;too much live hair.Not knowing the photo of Lowell, I go instead to the picture of Seamus Heaney on the front of the companion volume to this one, New Selected Poems 1966-87, painfully young, worried-looking, Noh-rice-flour-pale, against a dark brick wall ...”

“... be the best Irish poet since Yeats, which arose from rather casual remarks by the power-crazed Robert Lowell and the craze-powered Clive James, who seemed to have forgotten both MacNeice and Kavanagh. In the meantime, Heaney is a very good poet indeed – which is enough to be going on with.Heaney’s version of the Middle Irish Romance Buile Suibhne ...”

“... Charles Dickens, Henry James, Bram Stoker, Ulysses S. Grant, Toulouse-Lautrec, Lillie Langtry, Robert Mitchum and Jean Cocteau were also on the books. Some of their accounts are closed, crossed out with lines of red ink and marked ‘Dead’. Grand Duke Sergei of Russia’s reads ‘Assassinated’. A ‘Sundry Debtors’ list from 1909-41 fills a hundred ...”

“... In 2022 a feud between organised crime groups based on the Woodchurch estate and the neighbouring Ford estate culminated in the shooting of Elle Edwards on Christmas Eve. Edwards, a 26-year-old beautician, wasn’t the intended target. She just happened to be sitting outside a pub near two men in the Ford OCG, Kieran ...”

“... that bloodied face, the hero’s grimace, the whole thing like a campaign advert directed by John Ford. In Milwaukee, I bumped into Robert Auth, a member of the New Jersey General Assembly, who began telling me and a Swedish journalist that the Republican Party had always been all about surviving and staying on ...”

“... for his deviousness and dishonesty, remarkable for his complex and psychotic personality. Ford was an accident, an afterthought President who had little opportunity to demonstrate that those who described him as being without either ability or personality were wrong. Carter was inexperienced, unpredictable and weak. Reagan, even for his loyal ...”

“... and vibrant. We lunched together a few times but, alas, remained only good friends’ – to Anna Ford (‘I had the feeling that her first love was men and work came second’), and ‘my friend and discovery Selina – gorgeous, delicious Selina Scott’. The old boy seems always to have been unduly fascinated by sexual speculation. He finds it worthwhile ...”

“... that transcends class and sectarian interest. ‘The ideal of a Liberal party,’ said Robert Lowe in 1877, ‘consists in a view of things undisturbed and undistorted by the promptings of interest or prejudice, in a complete independence of all class interests, and in relying for its success on the better feelings and higher intelligence of ...”

“... in ‘The creatures of ice feignt and advance’ (or the truest poetry is the most feigning); on Robert Lowell’s achieving what is rare in him, a telling sequence, in his Selected Poems, ‘Nineteen Thirties’, 25 poems formerly scattered and now finding the arc they were meant for – on all these and on much else (Yeats’s fascism, and ...”

“... hard from Butte, Montana to Baton Rouge, Louisiana, careening from rodeo to rodeo in a yellow Ford Sedan and then a slick blue Packard with baby daughter Cyra in tow. ‘Unlikely candidates for parenthood, they made the best of it’ – which wasn’t all that good. ‘She was a soubrette, not a housewife,’ he was always one step ahead of the ...”

“... even liberal, white males (Jack Kemp). The logic was simple enough. Starting off with Robert Dole, the quintessential tough-guy white male candidate, the wounded veteran (= ‘war hero’ in current parlance), a man’s man of few words, the Convention would have been a total failure if it had unfolded as a celebration of manly virtues. That would ...”

“... crank-handle, the brawn of Hercules to make it start. The future lay with gasoline. In 1908, Henry Ford’s mass-produced Model T, priced at a level which Ford’s own $5-a-day workers could afford, gave oil-based fuel (of which America was then the world’s main producer) a commercial edge. In 1912, the electric starter ...”

“... to earn the right to the luxury of practising his art’. Heaney represents in similar fashion Robert Lowell’s year in prison as a conscientious objector during the Second World War. Lowell was ‘earning his poetic rights by service in the unpoetic world of jail’. Elsewhere, Heaney asks: ‘What right has poetry to its quarantine?’Heaney’s notion ...”

“... huge – he talked of a ‘Manhattan Project’ for the CEPH and described himself as the ‘Henry Ford of biology’ – and it soon became apparent that France alone could not supply the resources required to do genomics on the industrial scale he envisaged. He proposed to take the CEPH into an agreement with the new American biotech company ...”

“... Rockefeller (industry), Woolworth (merchandising), Eastman (photography), Morgan (credit), Ford (assembly line, plant police), Pullman (model town), Mary Baker Eddy (applied ontology), Taylor (time studies), Watson (behaviourism), Sanger (sex) etc, etc.’ Clearly Gaddis is concerned less with mechanisation per se than with the ‘more pervasive ...”