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“... to commit suicide. Everyone is … Suicide bombers don’t want to live anymore, they want to go to Paradise at once, but do they get there?’ ‘You are suffering from the empty nest. I can see it in your body and on your face. No wonder. You know that no one but children will ever love you again.’ She dismisses Howe with a moral instruction: ‘Take ...”

“... if he had spelt it all out in the true first person, recounting his triumphs and disasters in the field of sex and family life. The moral seems to be that writers use themselves better in their novels and stories than in an autobiography, in which they simply put it all down, with various degrees of relaxation and garrulity. A memoir by Proust, instead of a ...”

“... man, a professor of physics at the University of Rochester, who had written his PhD on the new field of X-ray technology. He was also fluent in Greek and Latin and a good businessman. After his grandfather’s death Ashbery told an interviewer that Henry Lawrence was the only person he had ever unconditionally loved. Because there was no kindergarten in ...”

“... and the thought that such thoughts are distinctively human. He is also making a joke. In the field of literary judgment, Spender can now and then outdo Auden, whose critical or speculative prose is, to my mind, one of the false lights of the postwar period. He cared for MacNeice, whose comparative neglect is another false light, while not responding to ...”

“... to have been flattered, even if Hermione is like her, which, says Lawrence, she isn’t. When Amy Lowell sent him money he forgot to thank her until he had to write about something else. Lawrence was very quick to despise people, not least his benefactors. Of course no individual stood much chance of pleasing him when he had declared war on the whole human ...”

“... or experimental verse, as opposed to more traditional or mainstream poets such as Robert Lowell, James Merrill and Richard Wilbur – the sorts likely to be published in the New Yorker and awarded Pulitzers. In those days, you were on one side or the other. Creeley was defiantly on The New American Poetry side, and his work figures prominently in ...”

“... sideways, as critical argument is forsaken for biographical chatter and a widespread sowing of the field with puffed wheat. There is always a remarkably serene sense of what an author would and wouldn’t have liked – ‘Jane Austen would have endorsed it instantly, and with amusement’ – often combined with puckish non sequiturs: This double focus is ...”

“... in The Eustace Diamonds, Mrs Hurtle in The Way We Live Now), and male ones who enjoy gambling or field sports and whose talk is ribald, even lewd (‘There’s nothing like a good screw’; ‘It’ll cost you something to mount Lady Tewett’). Trollope was even more bothered by men who wrote like women than he was by women who wrote like men. Disraeli’s ...”

“... might have done better to recognise that James’s craftsmanship is positively evangelical in the field of Pop. Let it be better made, as lyrics and music were in the days of Cole Porter, Lorenz Hart and Ira Gershwin, is his belief. This is an important aspect of his drive into popular culture: not just to enjoy the warmth of a wider appreciation and so avoid ...”

“... ventriloquism on the part of a wide and posthumous circle of acquaintance from Swinburne to Lowell and beyond, like a request to be left in peace – Villon is something of a cottage industry and the generator has been whirring fairly constantly beside the mallow patch. But it’s the translators most of us have to thank for knowing him at all. ‘It ...”

“... the mounted combats in the wilderness. At the end of it all, Lawrence was made into a celebrity by Lowell Thomas’s wildly popular travelling illustrated lecture, ‘With Allenby in Palestine and Lawrence in Arabia’. This was the sort of war the public paid money to see. Aldington, on the other hand, like millions of other British soldiers, had had a ...”

“... critics of poetry who simply follow current fashions. He possesses in a high degree what Robert Lowell called ‘the grace of accuracy’, and his work often echoes those early Irish nature poems he admires – poetry which, as he points out, belonged to a tradition which did not undergo Romance influences and which ‘registers certain sensations and makes ...”

“... partly because the moonlighting of the dons has kept remuneration artificially low throughout the field. Time spent on writing a review for the LRB is time taken away from fabricating lucrative stuff for the glossies, an activity which doesn’t hurt the conscience all that much because nobody reads it anyway. But one surprises within oneself the church-going ...”

“... distinguished figures have taken a swing at it, in one-offs or batches, including Pound, Beckett, Lowell and Norman Cameron. There have also been the thorough, proselytising translators, above all Wallace Fowlie, who wanted the whole oeuvre turned into English and the legend retold to Anglophone readers. And there was Edgell Rickword, in whom the two strands ...”

“... patience and justice, has done nothing better. To bring out three books on the same day, as Robert Lowell knew when he promulgated History, For Lizzie and Harriet and The Dolphin, is to ask for comparisons, indeed to cry out for them when some of the work is old, some new – and the more so when, as in Hinde’s case, each book costs the same to the ...”