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“... a letter from mother of stale news she’d already relayed over the phone, a card from Oscar Williams inviting us to a cocktail party in New York on the impossible last day of my classes. No news.’ In late 1959, waiting for short story acceptances that would not come, she wrote in her journal: ‘Must not wait for mail as it ruins the day.’ Then the ...”

“... EVIL SPOONS!’ In 1995, there was a photograph of a pretty woman with her baby: her name was Ann Furedi, and she worked for the British Pregnancy Advisory Service. ‘We too have gazed in wonder at … photographs of thumb-sucking foetuses which look so much like newborn babies. But we continue to support women’s right to abortion.’ The pro-abortion ...”

“... at Boulder, Colorado, or Grand Forks, North Dakota. ‘Prisoners of the Press Conference’, as Ann Charters captions them. Explainers of what is gone, apologists for what never happened. Literary stocks busking to sustain their market value, justify the next complimentary, two-seat air ticket. Corso always piled into these interviews with generous ...”

“... beautiful as the dawn”. These values of “art” persisted, and in the five years after I left Ann Arbor, I wrote exactly seven stories. In terms of experience, they were probably the richest years of my life: I was engrossed in a young, deep, complex, and stormy marriage; we lived mostly in the Village but also in Berkeley and in Maine; I worked in ...”

“... who was interested in a much looser, open style, as well as other Americans such as William Carlos Williams. Wavering between systems, Gunn didn’t please everyone. In August Kleinzahler’s introduction to the third Selected, which appeared in 2007 (the second came in 1979), Kleinzahler quoted two anthologists on the decline of Gunn. The first was ...”

“... first time out of the box,’ he said, ‘the Grammy, the Emmy, the Tony, the Oscar.’ Tennessee Williams wrote that ‘a giddy God … endowed her with an instrument that even she does not fully understand,’ and Pauline Kael took every opportunity to lionise her ‘protean, volatile talent’. At the end of her first gig in Los Angeles, at the Cocoanut ...”

“... one is sent to the entry for ‘Evans, Marian’; in the DNB one was directed to ‘Cross, Mary Ann or Marian’, her married name at the time of her death. Other social as well as historiographical changes can be encapsulated in what the ODNB calls the ‘statement of occupation or historical significance’ that follows a subject’s name and dates. For ...”

“... pupil plot in Britain and Ireland. John McGahern, Edna O’Brien, Richard Hoggart, Raymond Williams: they were all born between the end of the First World War and the early 1930s, and published their stories of class alienation in the late 1950s and early 1960s. It’s a bit late, too, for the middle-class unmarried motherhood plot: Lynne Reid ...”

“... then, too, there are all my mood-setting ‘highbrow’ CDs – the songs of Gerald Finzi, Vaughan Williams, George Butterworth, Gurney, Ernest Farrar. (The baritone Stephen Varcoe is unsurpassed in this repertoire.) I have but to hear the dark opening bars of Finzi’s ‘Only a Man Harrowing Clods’ to dissolve in sticky war nostalgia and an ...”