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“... to be drawn about all this, but I am confident that no American fatty is about to replace Kate Moss as the Western world’s acme of physical esteem. You do encounter fatties on this side of the Atlantic, but there aren’t nearly as many of them, and they’re somehow not quite the same. Europe’s chief fatty at the moment is Chancellor Kohl, the only ...”

“... though, are a delight and I stand addressing the camera while caressing the 15th-century Sir Robert Waterton and his wife, Cecily. At my back is Lionel, Lord Welles with his bruiser’s face, pudding-basin haircut and elaborate armour, which did not save him from being cut down at Towton on Palm Sunday 1461. Unnoticed on previous visits is a sad little ...”

“... I am being unfair, for many of the essays in the volume – on the development of Parliament (Robert Blake), ‘War and Peace with Wales, Scotland and Ireland’ (Hugh Trevor-Roper), art and popular taste (Quentin Bell), the evolution of the English landscape (Richard Muir) – are excellent and briskly-written popularising surveys. But the whole ...”

“... the deck of a boat. Astride a hay bale in San Rafael. Playing guitar for an audience of bark and moss. Playing cello on the edge of a lake in Minnesota.In 1968 Russell moved from Iowa to San Francisco, city of bays, bridges and hills. At this early stage he comes across as a somewhat sulky, ascetic figure. He bought his clothes from thrift stores and had ...”

“... also stormed the citadel of literary fiction, and characters in novels such as Karline Smith’s Moss Side Massive and Nick Hornby’s High Fidelity are identified, and minutely differentiated, by their music tastes. The characters in The Black Album tend not to be pinned down by their music tastes. Chili, the central character’s brother, is, in fact, one ...”

“... Gay and Arbuthnot. Thomson’s Seasons. For theology he went to Hooker, Tillotson, William Law and Robert South. For technical and ‘philosophic’ (i.e. scientific) expressions he went to John Ray’s Wisdom of God in the Creation, Grew’s Cosmologia Sacra, William Derham’s Physico-Theology, Thomas Burnett’s Theory of the Earth, Richard Bentley’s ...”

“... Beg’ and ‘A Postcard from North Antrim’, Heaney sounds that ‘heartbreak’ note which Robert Lowell used to talk about. Maybe Lowell talked to him about it. Field Work has an elegy in memory of Lowell (‘the master elegist’), and the two poets saw each other often during the mid-Seventies. In this book, even the ‘love-poems’ (a genre Heaney ...”

“... mind. First up is the garden at the Haworth parsonage:The mute bird sitting on the stone,The dank moss dripping from the wall,The garden-walk with weeds o’ergrownI love them – how I love them all!These lines prospect methodically, inching forward through parallelism and internal rhyme until they have identified the exact shape and size of the feeling that ...”

“... they are reunited. For no particular reason, they move on to Phoenix, where they gather a little moss in the shape of Bill’s Bible-crazy mother and his two brothers, one of whom is a drunk, the other a junky. The Houston brothers hamfistedly attempt bank robbery. Bill kills a guard, and qualifies as the first criminal to go to the gas chamber under ...”

“... and also about the happiness of writing a poem, about drinking with John Berryman, dining with Robert Lowell, driving with Stirling Moss, about his lovers, and briefly about his first – brief – marriage, to Frieda Lawrence’s granddaughter. There are in fact more than enough highly polished little gems about family ...”

“... lash to and fro like a dog shaking a rat. Compare this work of nature with Spiral Jetty, which Robert Smithson built out into Great Salt Lake in Utah thirty years ago. It’s more neatly coiled than the spit at Rudha Cailleach. Both change continually, the one in its shape, the other in its invisibility; indeed Salt Lake rose recently and drowned the ...”

“... to gateways in garden-walls that they might gaze along dewy lawns with lovers murmuring by the moss-grown sundial; I would lead them ’twixt hawthorn hedgerows, and over field-path stiles, to old-world orchards where the lush grass is strewn with red-cheeked apples, and even the wasps have lost their stings. From the grey church-tower comes a chiming of ...”

“... in the coastal village of Deià in Mallorca. There they had their second child and they asked Robert Graves to name him – Philip. ‘The Relics’, which appeared in Mathews’s first collection, The Ring (1970), is a set of variations on imaginary landscapes in yellow and red, bringing to mind the Phrygian Midas, and a landscape turning to clanking ...”

“... some reputation, now long gone, in the West. Marlene Dietrich fell to her knees before him; Robert Frost, visiting Moscow in 1962, made a point of seeking him out; he was touted for the Nobel Prize. I once owned an edition of the Selected Stories (from Progress Publishers, Moscow), ransomed from Foyles; my current copy is an on-demand Dutch reprint from ...”

“... afternoon, with its atmosphere of electioneering and death, brings to mind the insistent taps of Robert Lowell’s ‘For the Union Dead’: The stone statues of the abstract Union Soldier grow slimmer and younger each year – wasp-waisted, they doze over muskets and muse through their sideburns. Senator John Forbes Kerry, the nominee, didn’t spring ...”