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“... of ‘pax’ is somehow unassimilated, crackling angrily in a void of its own making. Like Ted Hughes, another poet much possessed by ‘violence’, Logue also writes children’s books, though neither poet seems often to enter that uncompromising world where children’s cruelty is for real. Both poets are ostensibly harsh and unevasive in portraying man ...”

“... of Clive James.* When, at one of the actual Festival’s talk-ins, I said that it was odd to find Peter Porter missing from various standard anthologies of Australian verse, I was given the clear impression that P.P. had simply got what he deserved. Among poets there was much talk of an ‘Australian identity’; one way of asserting this identity was to be ...”

“... I see it, and now that I’m in the joke very funny it is too. But it increases my doubts about Peter Wollen’s piece on Tina Modotti and Frida Kahlo, which is part of, which in fact comprises, that section of the anthology labelled ‘Women, Mexico, Revolution, Art’. Frida and Tina are, allegedly, revolutionary Mexican artistic women, linked also by ...”

“... spilled over naturally into writing it: Garfitt went to informal workshops with John Wain and Peter Levi, heard Ted Hughes read at the Poetry Society. Coghill read his poems, but wasn’t very enthusiastic; Peter Jay took a photo of him in a green silk smoking jacket looking ‘just ...”

“... and immortal. The book on which the film is based – a noir novel written in 1947 by Dorothy B. Hughes – is told from the point of view of a serial strangler named Dixon Steele. We know from the outset that he is guilty; what we don’t know is whether he’ll be caught, and, if he is, how many women he will have killed in the meantime. ...”

“... critics who think the poem is a straightforward confession of her desire to avenge herself on Ted Hughes. ‘Why she should have bothered to write poems if this was what she wanted to say is of course not explained,’ Forrest-Thomson remarks tartly. ‘It is taken to be enough that she was a poet.’ What Plath is really doing, she explains, is writing a ...”

“... 55 poets, you feel, blush for it. Mostly they contradict it. The style of interesting poets like Peter Didsbury, John Ash, Pauline Stainer and one of the editors, Michael Hulse, is not particularly ‘democratic’, but playfully enigmatic and donnish. There is a tendency to think aloud with a somewhat creaky jauntiness, as if the poets were sharing secrets ...”

“... Graeber in Bullshit Jobs, Paul Mason in Post-Capitalism, Rutger Breman in Utopia for Realists, and Peter Barnes in With Liberty and Dividends for All. UBI is definitely having a moment.Guy Standing is a long-standing member of BIEN, the Basic Income Earth Network, which, since its founding in 1986 in Louvain, has been the main body studying and advocating for ...”

“... and riddles. Her mother, Marie Hansen, had immigrated to the US in the 1880s, and her father, Peter Walker, whom she never knew, was born in the Danish West Indies (after 1917, the US-controlled Virgin Islands). The little that is known about him suggests that he was half-Danish. By any logical account, Nella Larsen was a Danish American. After the death ...”

“... loyalist terrorists, one of the workers, Walter Chapman, whispered to the sole Catholic, Richard Hughes, that he should stay silent. But one of the gunmen recognised Hughes and ordered him to ‘clear off down the road’. He did so and the gunmen opened fire, with armalites, SLRs, a 9mm pistol and an M1 carbine, on the ...”

“... Peter Redgrove had a secret. It was called ‘the Game’. Sexual in nature, this obsessive ritual ignited some of his most arresting poetry, and was vital to his personal mythology for sixty years. Known only to his lovers and a few in his inner circle, the Game has now been made public in Neil Roberts’s remarkable biography of the poet, published almost a decade after Redgrove’s death, along with a new Collected Poems ...”

“... Bowes-Lyon could get very caught up in the swooshiness of poetry. She loved going fishing with Ted Hughes. In the long boring afternoons in the Highlands, the hours between kippers and drinkies, poor Ted would take her down to the river and start Yorkshiring on about the trees. One comes away from William Shawcross’s biography of Bowes-Lyon (which refers to ...”

“... ends in the expulsion of a Catholic family from the estate. One son from this family is Francy Hughes, an outlaw figure who lives much of his life on the dump behind the estate in a kind of Boy’s Own UDI, apparently fierce and dangerous, the perfect embodiment of the wild Fenian for the inhabitants of the estate. Between this Francy and Mal, the hero, a ...”

“... imaginations. Many of the writers I discuss – Southey, Coleridge, Arnold, Hopkins, Larkin, Hughes – are in some important ways prompted by Irish history and culture, by the long and difficult relationship between the two islands. Their works, like the Anglo-Irish Agreement, have a dual identity at various crucial moments. Southey may appear to be a ...”

“... historians vied with each other to compose panegyrics to him. The biography written by Thomas Hughes, the author of Tom Brown’s Schooldays, said that Alfred disproved once and for all the thesis that Christianity was ‘no faith for fighters’: while the Vikings at Ashdown passed the night before the battle singing the ‘Death-Song of Ragnar ...”