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“... work up much enthusiasm for the post-Olsonian outpourings of the Seventies, most notably Allen Fisher’s Place, Place was set largely south of the river, a nowhere defined by unnecessary particulars. Now Roy Fisher, he could do something with him – but the man had the poor taste to base his mythology on Birmingham. My problem was the contrary ...”

“... you may, Earl, honey. I am Lady Darlene.’ There are even touches of Gracie (or is it Woody?) Allen:   ‘Was your father weak, passive, absent from home a lot?’   ‘You mean before he died?’ There is also a glum, constant sense of history being erased by show business, or just business. Chloris Craig, in her elevated social position, must be ...”

“... giving things a name.’ Antonioni is admired for his ‘establishment of distance’ and Woody Allen for the ‘rarefaction of images and particularly of angles … theorised in Annie Hall’. What Charlie Chaplin’s little barber is saying in The Great Dictator comes from somewhere that might be nowhere. Daney’s summary of the speech is: ‘Whatever I ...”

“... and Shrek 2. And so our screens are filled with girlymen stars like Leonardo DiCaprio and Elijah Wood, and not a rugged, crusty old geezer in sight, if you don’t count Keith Richards in his Pirates of the Caribbean cameo or the cartoon ogre Shrek. It is, Kanfer admits, a chicken and egg situation. Adults don’t go to the movies because they can’t find ...”

“... was $10 a month). The world inside was primitive, while the world outside was chaotic, a mix of wood houses, loft buildings and skyscrapers. From the streets Rauschenberg scavenged stuff like old bricks, wood blocks and metal scraps to produce his Elemental Sculptures. Most of these materials, broken and ...”

“... rediscovered: relations between the shop and the royal household had obviously been close. In the wood-panelled hall of Number Three is a large pair of scales hanging from the ceiling – it was used to measure bags of coffee, tea and sugar sold at the shop. But it was also handy for weighing customers. In part of London society in the 18th century interest ...”

“... them have penetrated.’ Of these three new translations of Dante (not all of them quite new, for Allen Mandelbaum’s was first published ten years or so ago), Mandelbaum’s and Pinsky’s belong firmly in the second class, whilst Ellis’s, which makes a point of the modernity of its idiom, aspires perhaps a little to the first class. The 20th century has ...”

“... and we can enjoy Flora’s company because we’re not married to her and because, as Woody Allen would say, she’s only fictional. Into this mix Nabokov clearly planned to insert a novel written by the narrator of the opening pages – that is, a person who knows (and sleeps with) Flora and turns her into a thinly disguised character called Laura. Or ...”

“... In Trees and Woodland in the British Landscape (1976), Oliver Rackham makes a distinction between wood and timber. Wood, the renewable crop, the source of staves, bean poles, hurdles, fodder and firewood, is what was coppiced from the same stools or pruned from the same trunks and branches over many years, in some cases ...”

“... getting his hands dirty.’ Corso is Sam Spade among the bibliophiles, a character out of Woody Allen as well as out of Eco. He is a pastiche of a pastiche, but he still fails to understand, until the end, that some coincidences are just coincidences, that both chance and conspiracy are features of the world we imagine we know. ‘I thought you were all ...”

“... shamans, revolutionaries all adrift in a Siberia borrowed, in about equal doses, from Woody Allen and Dostoevsky. The Tsar, a bandit says, weeping – ‘the Little Father of All the Russians ... is the friend of simple truth and doesn’t know the half of what his officials get up to on the side.’ Fevvers thinks: ‘Nobility of spirit hand in hand ...”

“... first two. (But then she will surprise, as she should, by praising Donald Davie, or attending to Allen Ginsberg.) If the lyric poem is self-contained and in some sense self-adjusting, then it follows that poets tear this membrane when they press too hard. Such forcing can be almost anything; it will be defined post hoc, by the size of the rent it has left in ...”

“... parody of Goethe’s famous poem which begins ‘On all mountain tops/There is peace’ (‘Über allen Gipfeln/ Ist Ruh’): ‘Under all waters/Is U.’ Kraus repeatedly represents the rabid wartime chauvinism of his compatriots, but manages to hit other targets at the same time. ‘The unattractive thing about chauvinism,’ he says in Dicta and ...”

“... in a long run of biographies. Its predecessors were by Ralph Barton Perry (1935), Gay Wilson Allen (1967) and Linda Simon (1998). There are also fine portraits in Jean Strouse’s biography of Alice James (1980) and in Louis Menand’s Metaphysical Club (2001). No lack of attention, then, but Richardson’s book is very welcome, in part because of his ...”

“... In February​ 2018, 120 women detainees at Yarl’s Wood Immigrant Removal Centre began a one-month work and hunger strike. Several received letters from the Home Office informing them that their deportation would not be delayed by their action, in fact it was more likely to be brought forward. Serco, the private company that runs Yarl’s Wood, denied that the hunger strike was taking place ...”