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“... these annotations are puzzling: on Palm Sunday, 10 April 1949, Lowell wrote a brief note to Elizabeth Bishop, a sympathetic message to his first wife, Jean Stafford, a weird word or two to a former lover, Gertrude Buckman, a sentence to George Santayana and two sentences to William Carlos Williams. Of these communications, those to Bishop, Buckman and ...”

“... in watercolour. The best-known limner was Nicholas Hilliard, who held a monopoly given by Queen Elizabeth ‘to make portraits . . . of our body and person in small compass in limning only’. Kim Sloan explains in the catalogue (British Museum, £25) that ‘Hilliard would never have described himself as a “painter”, which he felt was a mechanical ...”

“... at the time. After the publication of his first book, In Dreams Begin Responsibilities, in 1938, Allen Tate proclaimed his style ‘the only genuine innovation we’ve had since Pound and Eliot’. Old Possum himself sent words of admiration: ‘I want to see more poetry from you.’Schwartz was born in Brooklyn in 1913, the son of Romanian Jewish ...”

“... to admit, ‘has been perceived as being more fun’ than Lehmann.) In 1940, at the suggestion of Allen Lane, who unlike most publishers at that time had a large paper allocation, New Writing became Penguin New Writing. Wright sympathetically conjures up the blacked-out, hemmed-in Britain where the magazine found an immediate welcome and settled down to sell ...”

“... and seascape. In Paterson, Williams included extracts from letters from Edward Dahlberg, Allen Ginsberg, and from a woman called Marcia Nardi, who had turned up in his surgery in Rutherford in the spring of 1942 with a sick son and a sheaf of poems. Williams liked these a great deal, and wrote to say so. He also tried to persuade his publisher, James ...”

“... between three implacable women: Wallis, and the two queens. Mary and her daughter-in-law Elizabeth weren’t prepared to forgive the duchess, who in her turn could not forget, and would not let the duke forget, the snub of her lack of a royal title. Meanwhile in England the rest of the family set about adjusting to the new status quo. Like George III ...”

“... the struggles of power and principle he sees reflected in the plays Shakespeare wrote under Queen Elizabeth. The greater part of the book explores the plays about English history: the six King Henry plays and two King Richard plays, which relate the origins and course of the Wars of the Roses, and King John. But there are also extensive discussions of the ...”

“... inconceivable that someone would have chosen to live with such a monster of egotism, and yet Elizabeth Christy left her husband in Greece and moved to London to be with Fowles. Warburton claims that ‘Elizabeth is at the centre of the books, as she was of John Fowles’s life. There were no publishable novels before ...”

“... too easily, or too early. A full-of-himself student in Nashville in the 1930s, he was taken up by Allen Tate and John Crowe Ransom, and most of his later academic appointments could be traced back to this connection. Not that Jarrell ever felt inclined to gratitude: another of his famous, and most joyous, thrusts as a reviewer was aimed at the vitals of his ...”

“... thing, but this is obviously nonsense: the wonderful versions of classics such as ‘Barbara Allen’, ‘On the Trail of the Buffalo’, ‘Wild Mountain Thyme’ performed during his 1988 concerts powerfully illustrated the extent to which his involvement in folk music has only deepened. Since this set is the first in a projected series of volumes, and ...”

“... doctrine and practice of mental reservation which was particularly advocated by the Jesuits. While Elizabeth I, unlike contemporary Catholic sovereigns, never instituted any heresy prosecutions or conducted a general inquisition into religious beliefs, her government did demand conformity to the national Church, with fines for non-attendance, the requirement ...”

“... I know you.’ Hoover: ‘I feel like I know you too.’ A few moments later, the visitor met Allen Dulles, the director of the CIA. ‘You, Mr Chairman, may have seen some of my intelligence reports from time to time,’ Dulles said, smiling. ‘I believe we get the same reports,’ Khrushchev replied. ‘And probably from the same ...”

“... in Ireland as everywhere else, and not just in the Ascendancy circles in which Beckett grew up. Elizabeth Bowen records that when her house was temporarily taken over in 1922 by the young soldiers of the IRA they avidly seized from the shelves the thin scarlet Kipling volumes and seemed to find themselves and their aspirations given substance and colour in ...”

“... or hate poems because they are – every single one of them – failures? The poet and critic Allen Grossman tells a story (there are many versions of the story) that goes like this: you’re moved to write a poem because of some transcendent impulse to get beyond the human, the historical, the finite. But as soon as you move from that impulse to the ...”

“... Sichel doubted he had any Soviet assets at all. Even so, after taking over as director of the CIA, Allen Dulles concluded that ‘he’s on our side and that’s all that matters. Besides, one needn’t ask him to one’s club.’ The CIA shielded Gehlen and his collaborators from prosecution and gave them refuge in the United States even though Gehlen ...”