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“... as the currently accepted canon of excellence in post-1945 poetry: a canon consisting of Larkin, Hughes and Heaney. These three poets of the period have been most often treated to admiring essays both here and in the States, and it is these three who more than any of their contemporaries figure on the school and university syllabus. It may be said of course ...”

“... and drove him to fits of remorse. ‘I hope a letter is not too melodramatic,’ he writes to Michael and Edna Longley, after a perceived early failure to be an advocate for poetry in the North: ‘It is not so much in the hope of redressing any hurt as to allay my own embarrassment and guilt. As usual your attitude has been gracious and gentle in the ...”

“... began in the Eighties with another race. General Motors acquired a Californian aerospace firm, Hughes Aircraft, and was not sure what to do with its new property beyond the vague desire for a glitzy technology transfer. The company was often attacked for its failure to invest in R&D and in 1987, as a stroke of counter-propaganda, sponsored, via its new ...”

“... clearly you don’t have the brains of a seven-year-old.’ There is the dinner party for Michael Jackson at Hepburn’s New York townhouse, where the singer is silent on all topics except the pleasure he has in watching his pet boa constrictor eat small rodents. And there is the saga of Warren Beatty, with Berg’s help, recruiting Hepburn for Love ...”

“... other films, Ben-Hur, Flesh and the Devil, The Merry Widow and A Night at the Opera, and Howard Hughes, aviator and solitary. And Hitchcock, of course: ‘the only poète maudit to be successful’. Hitchcock succeeded, we learn, where Alexander, Julius Caesar and Napoleon failed: ‘in taking control of the universe’. But there is also a sense that ...”

“... he urges us to be more exclusive: Let us not prefer Ashbery to Yeats, Let us not suppose T. Hughes, On shining floors, Goes waltzing with a lyrical Muse. But the rebuke comes in verse which itself should stand rebuked. It is a pity that Grigson, a good poet in a context in which achievement is likely to be occasional at best, spends so much spirit in ...”

“... and a white-haired/eyebrowed/moustachioed, black-coated Supreme Court Chief Justice, Charles Evans Hughes. There’s Harpo again, this time with cotton-wool locks, alongside his brothers – Groucho’s moustache, glasses, cigar, wing-tipped head of hair, Chico’s sly open mouth and steel-wool hair identifying the ersatz Italian Jew. The three faces jump out ...”

“... Not surprisingly, the Americans do the job most lavishly, having the larger grants. Edited by Michael Palma, The Man I Pretend to Be presents I colloqui and selected poems by Guido Gozzano in parallel text, the English translations being by Mr Palma, who also translated the introductory essay by Montale. Gozzano was a predecessor whom Montale valued ...”

“... hand, were the crowning glory of the century of progress. A White Star Line poster reproduced in Michael Wilkinson and Robert Hamilton’s collection shows the great hulk of the ship, sunlit, belching smoke out of three of its four funnels – the fourth was there only for effect – and cutting a swathe between a small sailing ship and a three-masted square ...”

“... about a dozen times in his life – ever did any ‘Casting and Gathering’, it wasn’t with Ted Hughes, to whom the poem thus entitled is dedicated, but here, in the play of question and answer with O’Driscoll, who died in 2012, predeceasing his great mentor.‘I, or my books.’ For the duration of this brief, as it were twilit interval, Heaney is still ...”

“... Noting, to quote from Dame Helen’s report on its proceedings, that ‘with the exception of Ted Hughes ... post-war English poetry has not been exciting,’ it discovered also that ‘the American poets of the post-war period were much more experimental and adventurous than the English; but neither the Beat Poets of San Francisco, nor the Black Mountain ...”

“... sort of poetry that Fenton writes, and that is also written, in their various ways, by Fuller, by Michael Hofmann, Tom Paulin, Christopher Reid and others. Certainly the romantic rhetoric that is second nature to Larkin, as to Auden, Yeats and Eliot, has no place in their poetic repertoire. It once seemed so ‘natural’, but beside their literariness and ...”

“... race meetings [who] ... belong to the world of the RSPCA’) with the ‘urgent’ horses of Ted Hughes’s ‘A Dream of Horses’, a poem ‘unquestionably about something’. Linked in this way, the poems make each other look slightly ridiculous – their titles alone adequately inform us what they are ‘about’ – though each on its own is a ...”

“... and rhythms of the poem ‘I Speak of the City’, Paz said: ‘No, I was thinking of Langston Hughes: The Negro Speaks of Rivers.’ This thought doesn’t cancel the other, and says quite a lot about Paz’s range. The poems often focus on the illumination of a particular instant (light is everywhere in this work), a concentration or evasion of time and ...”

“... Clint Eastwood, Lee Marvin, James Coburn, and in England – and in a different, English way – Michael Caine, seldom did anything else. It was also a manner which could not always be easily distinguished from simple idleness. For the first 25 years of Mitchum’s career, his performances were routinely mocked – most consistently by Mitchum himself ...”