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“... bombing raids at a pub in the Chiltern village of Fingest. Opposite this was a house where Bernal had for some years been living with Margaret Gardiner and their son Martin – then a most undisciplined small boy, but now, I understand, a highly distinguished Chinese scholar living in the USA and certainly heir to his father’s intellectual gifts. Bernal’s ...”

“... into the figure of Bacchus and the ‘thiasos’, his band of ecstatic worshippers. Harrison had read her Nietzsche and set off in pursuit of the ‘darker, older’ shapes to be glimpsed behind the clear forms of Greek drama and Platonic dialogue. Harrison is known for having challenged the Victorian account of fifth-century Athens as a model of ...”

“... own wrists … “She” is I.’ By the time Mop Mop Georgette was published in 1993, her poems had become passionate, sensuous and rhetorical: full-throated arias. And yet a tincture of doubt, vulnerability and irony keeps the work from tipping into self-regarding ‘empowerment’. In ‘Dark Looks’: ‘it’s not right to flare and quiver at some ...”

“... insisted that she couldn’t (be bothered to) remember.By the time of this royal visit, Harrison had long been well known as a Cambridge – and national – pioneer. In 1874, she had been one of the earliest students at the newly established Newnham College and, in a classic case of that elite English over-confidence in ...”

“... is a suggestive poem about what the living can get from the dead: Widgeon For Paul Muldoon It had been badly shot. While he was plucking it he found, he says, the voice box – like a flute stop in the broken windpipe – and blew upon it unexpectedly his own small widgeon cries. Muldoon has said often enough in interviews that he likes ...”

“... provoked further interesting correspondence, and there was even a suggestion that the paper had faked the letter with this in mind, inventing, as it were, a ‘suicide craze’. On these and other matters Stokes is vivid and economical. It is only a little too much to say, as the publishers do, that his is the most wide-ranging study since Holbrook ...”

“... Roger Roughton’s Contemporary Poetry and Prose, Browsing in Zwemmer’s as a schoolboy, he had encountered Surrealism in its heyday and news of the Surrealist revolution in Europe in the mid-Thirties transformed his life. His journals of the time are the record of a passionate cross-Channel love affair with the Parisian avant garde (and varyingly ...”

“... Acutely conscious at once of the burden of the past – the intimidating totality of what had already been written – and of the present’s lightness, its free and easy way with burdens, its failure to be intimidated, the Modernist did not propose to carry on as before. To be literary at all, in such circumstances, one would have really to mean ...”

“... disproportionately few seats – fewer than in any previous election. All the other contenders had a regional base. The BJP, who got fewer votes but a larger number of seats, was strong in six states in the north and west. The strength of the most successful party of those in the ‘social justice’ bloc, the Communist Party of India (Marxist), was ...”

“... begin his Fulbright Fellowship. He looks to have the world at his feet. Earlier that year Ashbery had been turned down by the Fulbright committee for the fifth time. This greatly disappointed him: he was desperate to travel – he had ‘not been literally anywhere’ – and was stuck in a dreary job as a copywriter at the publishing house McGraw-Hill. The ...”

“... though they usually sell for thousands rather than millions. It’s as if Pollock and Duchamp had formed a partnership to establish market dominance and the company had stayed in business ever since.Richter was born in Dresden in 1932. His early life was shaped first by the war and then by the Soviet occupation. This ...”

“... of Midwesterners, ‘spacey with oestrogen from large quantities of meat and cheese’. ‘Love had its neat trick of making you mourn it so much, it reappeared. Popped right up from the casket,’ thinks a woman exhausted by her husband’s betrayals, the recurrence of her cancer, an unnecessary move to a rotten and needy house. ‘Her rage flapped ...”

“... a foil for experimental painters, or for his difficult friend Ezra Pound. More recently, we have had Williams the avant-garde sentinel, dislocating sense and meaning in the manner of Gertrude Stein, and Williams the multiculturalist, pitting his Spanish-Caribbean heritage against a Eurocentric world. Williams the doctor-poet proved that words can ...”

“... of a Man Unknown (1948). (The war between antediluvian existentialists and cool modernists had not yet started.) Without the advent of the ‘new novel’ in the 1950s, Sarraute’s career might not have taken off at all. But it did take off, and towards the end of the century, her status was such that her works were consecrated by a Pléiade edition ...”

“... novels were virtually all Bildungsromane or Künstlerromane. Her own journey to artistic maturity had been long and difficult: her first Greek novel, The Last of the Wine (1956), didn’t come out until she was 51 and living in South Africa as the country was in the throes of apartheid. She was fascinated by the process of becoming, and all her novels feature ...”