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“... on the cover of the notorious ‘Ern Malley’ issue. Ern Malley was a poet invented by two young men who thought Modernism had destroyed the craft of verse. They compiled his poems by picking fragments at random from the Concise Oxford Dictionary, Shakespeare and a dictionary of quotations. For many Australians, this hoax confirmed that Modernism was a ...”

“... after he got tired of being a schoolmaster. He once said he had liked teaching because it kept him young, but acting let him be other people, and in the 1940s he thrived, voicing the RAF documentary Squadron 992 and appearing as the compere in the variety show Rainbow Round the Corner. Along with the BBC’s senior announcer, Leslie Mitchell, he became a voice ...”

“... Rozanov had made an unnecessary journey from Moscow to Gorky, simply in order to sleep with a young blind woman.’ He is a poet, she is a student of his work whom he has never met before. It is a hot October night in the early 1980s and after copulation (‘acrobatic but lacking in finesse’), Rozanov and his partner find themselves unable to sleep. He ...”

“... travels Scotland towards the end of his life, gauging morale and wondering what system could help young folk to flourish. Kenneth White, a Glaswegian based in Brittany and professor at the Sorbonne, is for ever wondering, as he walks the beaches of Western Europe, which place is home for him. Beveridge and Turnbull, ...”

“... the 1930s as a masterpiece by Botticelli, but the feeling that something was wrong about it grew. Kenneth Clark said the Madonna had ‘something of the silent cinema star about her’ (he mentioned Jean Harlow), and the too full lips, the baby-doll look, now seem very un-Botticelli: the picture refuses to fit the template. The models and film stars that ...”

“... Thus it was not really surprising that, early in 1943, when I received a letter from a poet named Kenneth Rexroth in San Francisco, I knew nothing about his work or about the extraordinary life he had already lived. My ignorance was partly understandable since, though he had been writing poetry for twenty years, Rexroth did not publish his first book of verse ...”

“... summer, Labour will plunge once more into debating its own history. Not reluctantly, because as Kenneth Morgan points out, the Party ‘has been captivated, even obsessed, by its history’; even more than the Conservatives it is, he says, ‘a prisoner of its past’. Yet the debate will probably be more painful than in the recent past, because it will ...”

“... say that you once had a wank in 1947.’ Alan Bennett’s remark is quoted with obvious feeling by Kenneth Dover in a late-inserted footnote to his autobiography, Marginal Comment. Someone, he explains, had leaked part of the typescript of his book to the Evening Standard, who, on the scent of celebrity masturbation, had splashed (under the headline ‘Oxford ...”

“... Kenneth Koch (pronounced ‘coke’) could do a mean impersonation of William Carlos Williams. ‘This is Just to Say’, Williams’s note asking forgiveness for eating the plums in the icebox which ‘you were probably/saving/for breakfast’ on the grounds that they were ‘so sweet/and so cold’, gets the Koch treatment in ‘Variations on a Theme by William Carlos Williams’: I chopped down the house that you had been saving to live in next summer ...”

“... rather than awe-struck. The two books under review approach their subject from opposite corners. Kenneth Harris trudges deferentially through his subject’s life, like one of those grey-haired guides in cardigans who steer tourists through National Trust houses. Until the Epilogue he takes elephantine care never to appear to intrude his own ...”

“... Attlee volunteered for active service. With commendable restraint in a very full and rich book, Kenneth Harris passes quickly over Attlee’s distinguished war service in the Dardanelles, which took him to the rank of major. At the war’s end, Attlee achieved considerable local prominence as both prospective Parliamentary candidate for Limehouse and, in ...”

“... reports!’) when he began it in 1960. The complete Poems, edited, tidied up and annotated by Kenneth and Miriam Allott, were revised and reissued in 1979. A new edition is on the way from Nicholas Shrimpton. Cecil Lang is up to the second instalment of the Letters (despite fierce crossfire from rival scholars in the letters pages of the TLS). Following ...”

“... Kenneth Morgan’s history of our times is both rewarding and frustrating. It is rewarding on government and politics since 1945, and frustrating on social and economic structure. Between the two, at the point where government and society meet, Dr Morgan is at his most interesting and controversial. He develops a thesis about the decline of leaderships and authority in Britain which may or may not be right, but which lends the book a vision and a theme ...”

“... oral history ward. If the old identify too closely with the ideas and emotions of the past, the young have difficulty in understanding them at all. If their politics descend from the radicalism of the 1970s, they find the assumptions of someone like Attlee or Bevin antiquated and hard to explain historically. How could a left-wing government have invested ...”

“... work is resistant to that sort of reading, and he held that the meaning was embedded in the sound. Kenneth Rexroth, reviewing Some Time in 1956, wrote that the poems were ‘exercises in absolute clarification, crystal cabinets full of air and angels’. Here, in the first half of a poem for the two-year-old Paul, Zukofsky seems to have had Herrick’s ‘To ...”