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“... I hung about must have been composed by the unofficial mythmaker. The Black Locomotive by Rian Hughes is a post-Ballardian novel with strong graphic elements.* Text is interleaved with maps, charts, grids. And by manipulated digital photographs as sophisticated as anything produced by the Tideway publicists. Hughes is ...”

“... as much as nature itself are the sources of his metamorphosising imagination. Unlike Ted Hughes or Seamus Heaney, he has never felt the need to make his diction coincide with the rugged or violent nature he depicts. In a previously uncollected poem, ‘A Kind of People’, he writes: Umbrellas and parasols, Like old navy raincoats, Sewing ...”

“... equivalent ‘little bugger’, not as cowardly a substitution as the author of this biography, Michael Snyder, seems to think. ‘Motherfucker’ was taboo, but also unfamiliar in a British context. ‘Bugger’ was a robust stand-in.Snyder starts his book with Sitwell’s epiphany but acknowledges the exaggeration behind Purdy’s claim that she had saved ...”

“... A mystique of language for its own sake is the power source and the danger of Modernism. Michael Schmidt’s five American poets avoid (the best of their work avoids) both abstractions. The language has a life of its own and a life in relation to a recognisable real world, as in James McMichael’s ‘Compline’: Gudique is the chastening. She is ...”

“... old men. Her exhibition at the National Portrait Gallery was full of them. She visits the elderly Michael Hamburger at his Suffolk farmhouse with her movie camera, zooming in on the wonky doorways, the rotting window frames, the overgrown garden, the teetering piles of books – an old poet’s props. She watches as he inspects his apple orchard, the wind in ...”

“... Hall and spoke from the platform during the March on Washington. (Ean Wood wonders if Langston Hughes, who knew Baker in Paris in the 1920s, had her in mind when he included the verse ‘Look at that gal shake that thing./We can’t all be Martin Luther King’ in the second edition of his anthology, The Poetry of the Negro; the lines were originally ...”

“... answers to its own implied questions. It is a work of strange, muted power and intelligence. Michael Schmidt doesn’t make entry to The Dresden Gate easy. For quite some time I was totally confused about how the various characters related one to another. And I never understood why these people with Spanish names in an unspecified South or Central ...”

“... and writing, began to hang out together. In the summer of 1964, Jacqueline and their son Michael went to Long Island while Brian stayed in New York working on The Emperor of Ice-Cream. Frank Russell, who had won a Guggenheim for his nature writing, also left New York. Brian and Jean became lovers that summer, and not long afterwards Jacqueline and ...”

“... made me a suit last year. My first suit and probably my last. 3 March. Lunch at L’Etoile with Michael Palin and Barry Cryer, Elena Salvoni still presiding there at lunchtime and though she’s 90 not looking much different from when I first got to know her at Bianchi’s in the 1960s. Barry as usual fires off the jokes which are almost his trademark but ...”

“... in the land, announced his resignation that morning. Not only Baroness Falkender but also Sean Hughes, the prospective Parliamentary candidate for Harold’s seat, describes the moment: he was teaching a class and was summoned from his desk by a caretaker, who commanded him to go home and change into a suit. ‘When I asked him what he was talking ...”

“... extended lines and branching references pay homage not just to canonised titans like Langston Hughes and Gwendolyn Brooks, but to contemporary Black poets: Elizabeth Alexander and Terrance Hayes; Harryette Mullen, Reginald Dwayne Betts and Evie Shockley. (He is one of the few young poets who has learned from Hayes without copying him.) But if Charleston ...”

“... to spare him a confrontation with the truth. ‘If Philip hadn’t been drugged,’ his friend Michael Bowen remembered, ‘he would have been raving. He was that frightened.’Larkin’s letters are full of references to his fear of death, some humorous, some grimly foreboding. In November 1982 he wrote to Motion about a dinner held for Thatcher by the ...”

“... of his novel, leading us back from impending departure into the events of the previous year. Michael is an unprepossessing family man. He takes what he likes and abuses the rest, which is sometimes his wife. When her pregnancy entered its advanced stages, she became useless, no longer pleasurable, and he left her for the consolations of his ...”

“... his bowels were the subjects of countless agonised (and, for the robust William, trying) letters. Michael Anesko’s archivally heroic and at times scandalmongering book traces the way the legendary Master took hold of the public imagination while stifling the real James. Monopolising the Master opens with James’s own efforts to determine his posthumous ...”

“... five to four, the Court found that the Minnesota law violated the First Amendment. Chief Justice Hughes, who wrote the opinion, devoted much of it to a discussion of English legal history: the struggle against licensing of the press, and Blackstone’s conclusion that the liberty of the press meant putting no previous restraints or publication. But then ...”