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“... or hadn’t stopped to think about. There is the careful, non-intrusive touch of the directors (Mark Sandrich for Top Hat and Shall We Dance and George Stevens for Swing Time); and there are the differences among Irving Berlin (Top Hat), Jerome Kern (Swing Time) and George Gershwin (Shall We Dance) as composers. There is ...”

“... either in Paris or London.’ Then, of course, it was another matter. James, Whistler, Sargent, Mark Twain, Bret Harte, Stephen Crane, Harold Frederick, Henry Harland of the Yellow Book, Pound, Eliot, Frost; from 1894 to 1914 it seems that all the crème, not to mention the avant garde, of American talent was centred on London. Well, not ...”

“... Elena Kagan, Barack Obama’s nominee to replace the retiring Supreme Court justice John Paul Stevens, is scheduled to appear before the Senate Judiciary Committee in late June. Before she is confirmed by the committee, she will have to answer questions about her views on the constitution and her lack of judicial experience ...”

“... but some of the poems it contains are among the best he has written.Listen to Seamus Perry and Mark Ford discuss Seamus Heaney in their Close Readings series on the LRB ...”

“... a broken neck.Millay rose to fame while still in her twenties. She beat Robert Frost and Wallace Stevens for the Pulitzer Prize in 1923. Although she became a proselytiser in her last decade, devoted to progressive causes to which she fitted her verses (‘not poems, posters,’ she admitted), she was still in demand for lectures and recitations, and had ...”

“... corridors of power and the demi-monde of poets’ pubs. Like the Eliot he admires and the Wallace Stevens he deplores, you wouldn’t think he was a poet, to look at him: ‘When I am deposited at my desk I become, as nearly as may be, purely functional.’ But his office is in St James’s Square, and a seductive symbol can be seen from the window: the ...”

“... began with, or endured through, the appalling This Side of Paradise to the triumph of Gatsby. Stevens, Cummings, Pound, Crane, Dos Passos: their merits and possibilities of development were noted at an early stage in their careers. For two decades or a little more, Wilson was almost infallibly discerning about recent American writers, about their British ...”

“... an XI in which every position is taken by a Gary. I will start you off. Gary Bailey in goal. Gary Stevens right back. Now you carry on.’ Yes, truly boring. But in those days soccer-mania was dark and lonely work. Outside my small circle of co-bores, most people I knew just didn’t want to know. From time to time, I’d cut a prole-ish dash in pubs or quell ...”

“... vegetable sprouts thorns and runs with poison and aspires to the condition of creeper (Wallace Stevens’s ‘vine angering for life’). Home from home to invasive species, from carp to kudzu, from rain trees and Australian cockroaches to hundreds of thousands of Irma and Maria refugees from Puerto Rico. A world of allergens, dissolved like fish food in ...”

“... is true, but it is not an aphorism: it lacks point, in the sense of OED IV.10, a or b, as when Mark Pattison said of an inscription that its moral was better than its point, or Pope’s dunce was armed with points, antitheses and puns. Sometimes there is point, but also a degree of awkwardness that virtually cancels it, as in this uncharacteristically ugly ...”

“... There is a picture of Mark Rothko taken at his East Hampton studio in 1964. He is sitting on one of those solid wooden beach chairs that stand around on the porches of Long Island summer cottages, looking at one of his own paintings as one might look at the sea, patiently pursuing all that his picture has in it. He was famous for this: for attending on the effect of each change in the angle or intensity of light, for looking close up and far off ...”

“... or Coleridgean or Wordsworthian flotsam to keep his poor floundering head above water. It is a mark of Clarel’s complete failure as a narrative poem that several people die in the course of it, including (spoilers, but if any poem deserved to be spoiled it’s this one) the hero’s great love, Ruth, but with most of these deaths you aren’t quite sure ...”

“... were the painters associated with the gallery: William de Kooning, Jackson Pollock, Philip Guston, Mark Rothko, Helen Frankenthaler, Jane Freilicher, Grace Hartigan, Alfred Leslie, Larry Rivers, Norman Bluhm and Fairfield Porter. It all made for a vigorous little scene, a fair bit of it played out at the Cedar Bar, then on 9th St in Greenwich ...”

“... of disingenuousnes in both contestants. For the text under discussion is Scriptural, the Gospel of Mark; and we are nowhere told which of the antagonists, if either, is a believing Christian. I suspect that Dame Helen is, and that Kermode suavely but quite strenuously isn’t. To pretend that this doesn’t matter, when discussing a text that Christians accept ...”

“... of Eton have had notoriously unpredictable effects upon the flower of England’s youth. Mark Twain’s remark that ‘soap and education are not so sudden as a massacre, but they are more deadly in the long run’ by implication lends genetic engineering, as well as massacre, a certain comparative respectability. Glover very deftly plays off against ...”