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“... of the poem suggests a quite dissimilar literary world, toughly at ease with its own brutalities. William Pritchard has written well on the vivacity the younger Larkin learned (with Auden, it has to be added, as a forerunner) from the playful rhythms and rememberable idioms of dance-music lyrics. His cool plotting and harshly humorous caricatures seem to me ...”

“... Beginner, published in 1966, about living in Cairo as a child between the wars: her father, Sir William Goodenough Hayter, was a judge with the Anglo-Egyptian Service, a vital arm of the British Protectorate running the country from the wings. There were many prints of Egypt in our Zamalek flat – picturesque views of the ruins and the pyramids and Old ...”

“... of machine for grinding general laws out of large collections of facts.’ He eventually found Shakespeare ‘so intolerably dull that it nauseated me’. But the imaginative arts lined up to pay tribute. In Cambridge, Ian McEwan and A.S. Byatt spoke about their ‘literary relationship with Darwin’. The joint Yale-Cambridge museum homage, Endless ...”

“... a form of apologetics). Yet the effort to exempt from the category of gay literature the novels of William Burroughs and Jean Genet or the poetry of Allen Ginsberg or James Merrill simply because these works are superior, serious and consecrated is a rearguard action designed to trivialise the label ‘gay art’. It is also a strategy to recuperate for a ...”

“... of his body – and as unsafe. ‘Laurence Olivier is less gifted than Marlon Brando,’ wrote William Redfield in Letters from an Actor. ‘He is even less gifted than Richard Burton, Paul Scofield, Ralph Richardson and John Gielgud. But he is still the definitive actor of the 20th century. Why? Because he wanted to be.’ Holden’s book never reconciles ...”

“... act: its transfer to the impact of poetry is presumably not insignificant. In the same way, the Shakespeare passage is the comment of chilly Octavius on the fickleness of a populace which switches support from him to the burnt-out lecher Antony. Lyndall Gordon rightly remarks on the psychological importance of these letters to Aiken, but they have ...”

“... a disfiguring hair transplant) and passages of broad pastiche, such as this from a novel about Shakespeare: ‘“Fye, Will,” said Lucretia, arching backwards and pulling William towards her, “keep thy wit for thy plays, for wit is a poor actor that comes on and plays his part and is heard no more, but the part I ...”

“... finished novel, Troubles, which took shape rapidly and was published in 1970, winning praise from William Trevor and Elizabeth Bowen. ‘If I had bothered to look at [my] diary,’ he noted two months after its publication, ‘I wd also have used the “flight of stone steps leading up into thin air”, which I simply forgot.’ He had added a detail to his ...”

“... attention from what the speaker is intimating. The extensive use of Ecclesiastes or the Psalms or Shakespeare or Gray’s ‘Elegy’ made the poems familiar on first acquaintance, as if self-memorising. But the reception crackles with distortion, and the voices are unsettling. If the speaker’s image of himself as ‘a dead man out of mind’ in the last ...”

“... 1904, the third child of Walter Skrine, an upper-class Englishman from Bath, and Agnes ‘Nesta’ Shakespeare Higginson, who came from an austere unionist family in Antrim and was better known as the Celtic Revival poet Moira O’Neill. (Versions of the dour Antrim aunts with whom the Skrine children were sent to stay every summer appear in all of Keane’s ...”

“... of the ancients. Strauss’s views or versions of them were alive and well in the persons of William Bennett, Lynne Cheney, Chester Finn, Dianne Ravitch and Quayle chief of staff William Kristol, and it is at least arguable that these and others close to the Administration were able to influence its ...”

“... time he deals almost too fully with the troubles of Eliot’s first marriage (compared, say, with William Empson’s very different, idiosyncratic but suggestive analysis of the filial Eliot at the period of The Waste Land) in no way affects this position. Hastings, too, takes as his subject the private life and yet gives us, as both condition and ...”

“... Hardwick recalled, ‘skinny, smoking, and he was quite surprised that I had read everything.’ William Phillips, who co-edited Partisan Review with Rahv, described her as ‘one of our most cutting minds’, ‘charming even when most devastating or malicious’. Isaiah Berlin said she was ‘much more bitchy’ than Mary McCarthy, ‘but sharper and more ...”

“... punting Elvis memorabilia, pubs touting exotic lunchtime entertainment, while boasting that Bill Shakespeare had been a regular. (Bricklayer/playwright Ben Jonson of the customised moniker, it’s true, killed a man in these streets and got off by pleading benefit of clergy.) Shoreditch survived as a prophylactic, an interzone protecting the City of London ...”

“... and look, some dusty peasants); the conversation, with Pasternak holding forth ‘as if Goethe and Shakespeare were his contemporaries’; the meal, at which his wife, ‘dark, plump and inconspicuous’ (and often unnamed), makes a sour appearance; the arrival of other members of the Peredelkino colony, the dead undead; the toasts, invoking spiritual ...”