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“... most extended and schematic exorcism of history and mythology. The poem is – to borrow Paul Zweig’s phrase for ‘Song of Myself’ – a ‘therapeutic epic’. Each of its main characters represents an unfortunate aspect of the West Indian inheritance which, as the poem progresses, is either cured or comfortably accommodated. Philoctete, for ...”

“... In Frognal, Sayre met Charlie Chaplin (depicted as arrogant, politically obtuse and unfunny), Paul Robeson, W.E.B. Dubois, the left-wing filmmakers Joseph Losey, Carl Foreman and Abraham Polonsky, the screenwriters Richard Collins, Ring Lardner Jr and Waldo Salt, the critics Harold Clurman and Ken Tynan, the musicians Larry Adler and Yip Harburg, as well ...”

“... had exhausted the poetic impulse. Nothing was left for us to do.’ The Chicago poet and editor Paul Carroll, born in 1926, wrote: To a young poet the scene in American verse in the late 1940s and early 1950s seemed much like walking down 59th Street in New York for the first time. Elegant and sturdy hotels and apartment buildings stand in the enveloping ...”

“... and acquired the unlovely nickname of Buffalo Bill. (The name is from the eponymous poem by e.e. cummings: ‘how do you like your blueeyed boy/Mister Death’. ) On the walls of the cell are Lecter’s drawings; one over the sink shows the Duomo and the Palazzo Vecchio in Florence, seen from the Belvedere. Lecter is lying on his bunk, perusing the Italian ...”

“... old fleeting celebrities: they included Charles Laughton, Douglas Fairbanks Jr, Ira Gershwin, e.e. cummings and Lord Mountbatten. He became conspicuously friendly with the Duke of Edinburgh. Science was not then, and has never been, a celebrity preoccupation, but war tends to move science rapidly up the agenda. Radar, the jet engine, nuclear ...”

“... her own head, or in our time, or in the ancient world. Carson wrote in Economy of the Unlost that Paul Celan ‘uses language as if he were always translating’: we could say the same thing about her. Her translations usually sound like the rest of her poems, obtrusively contemporary but studiedly idiosyncratic, plainly weird (they may reflect their weird ...”

“... to reveal a malevolent conspiracy to remove the People’s Boris from power, led by Dominic Cummings and for the benefit of Sunak, and set in train immediately after the 2019 election. What I hesitate to call the details are for the birds (‘Much of what I know,’ she broods, ‘will never see the light of day due to the “legals”’). The truly ...”

“... non-payment of the TV licence. Anonymous briefings – which may as well have been signed ‘D. Cummings’ – appeared in the weekend papers promising to ‘whack’ the BBC, to end the licence fee and gut its output. The renewal of the BBC charter, which takes place once a decade, isn’t due until the end of 2027, but the government can do plenty of ...”

“... creation of a head of ‘story development’. The post of official fabulist was filled by Paul Hamill, who would play an inglorious role in the fabrication of the Dodgy Dossier of September 2002.We weren’t careful what we half-wished for. We did not anticipate the effects a free-flowing, direct, 24/7 style of communication would have on the quality ...”

“... was the toast of Paris. After seeing her in Chocolate Dandies, the Greenwich Village poet, e.e. cummings reported ecstatically that ‘she resembled some tall, vital, incomparably fluid nightmare which crossed its eyes, warped its limbs in a purely unearthly manner.’ The Lindy, the Charleston and blackbottom were in vogue in the dance halls and nightclubs ...”