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“... to steal his goodnight kiss:She was wearing a white cloth dressing gown, her admirable loosened black hair, containing all the gentleness and all the power of her nature, and which survived for so long like an unconscious vegetable growth of ruins that she protected tenderly at the cost of her happiness and beauty, framed a face of adorable purity, gleaming ...”

“... and I earnestly recommend it. Schuyler readers have fared rather well since his death, in 1991. Black Sparrow brought out The Diary of James Schuyler in 1996 and the Selected Art Writings in 1998; in 1999 Slow Dancer published as Last Poems those pieces that had been included in the American Collected but not the Selected; and the New York Review of Books ...”

“... Ike Eze-anyika’s Canteen Culture, which won the 1998 Saga Prize ‘for the best first novel by a black British or Irish writer’, is a fictional exposé of the Met (‘the arsehole of the Civil Service’) and an episodic comedy caper. Team I of Northwick police station – Bubba, Lionel, Speedy, Sponge, moustachioed Saddam and Jazz (who’s ...”

“... best-known practitioners – all men of the same generation, born in the mid to late 1960s – are Michael Chabon, Junot Díaz and Jonathan Lethem. The books they wrote were interested in popular culture or counterculture as much as in the thoughts and passions of characters. Chabon’s The Amazing Adventures of Kavalier & Clay (2000) chronicled the rise of ...”

“... described in a poem how the dark nightmare entered his own life in childhood: When I was five the black dreams came; Nothing after was quite the same. Come back early or never come. The poem is entitled ‘Autobiography’, but there is little in it of what one usually means by that term; the immediate occasion of his terror, the death of his mother, is not ...”

“... opted for a bikini wax.) Apart from the matelot’s scarf round his neck, the rest was his lithe, black, naked bod. (For comparison, on this stretch of the tour Jagger mostly wore jerseys representing local American football teams.) Prince’s biracial, polysexual band likewise came off as a distinctly queer sight in this locale. They were everything that ...”

“... how the names should be grouped by a principle of ‘meaningful adjacency’. As best he could, Michael Arad listed the names near or next to those with whom they had some sort of living affiliation. The memorial genre that includes trees, pools and waterfalls arouses expectations of an enforced absorption, an unignorable demand that one register the ...”

“... set up an amazing social programme, which Channel 4 did a documentary on, to help underprivileged black kids from inner cities escape to the countryside, so a bit like working farms or city farms …’ ‘It’s a great story,’ the MP said. ‘Came to England aged three from Jamaica. Grew up in sort of real poverty – the back end of Birmingham, big ...”

“... she seems not to have had a ghost, unlike John Prescott, who was ventriloquised by Hunter Davies; Michael Levy credits a journalist friend, Ned Temko, for his ‘invaluable help, talent and patience’. You certainly don’t hear the Cherie described by Michael Levy, ‘every bit the get-ahead barrister’, who on their ...”

“... can endure this tension every day of his life is a fool and changes the world.’ It is, as Michael Hamburger remarked in his survey of postwar German writing, After the Second Flood, an earnest of Grass’s sophistication as a dialectician: by putting his shoulder to the wheel of gradual social change while insisting on art’s autonomy he was ...”

“... the fetching. More engaging is a visit to the village of Middleton, and to the poet and critic Michael Hamburger, whose dreams and memories might have been created expressly for this book. ‘Why it was that on my first visit to Michael’s house I instantly felt as if I lived or had once lived there, in every respect ...”

“... Michael Clune​ first took heroin in July 1997. Afterwards, he lay on the roof of his friend Chip’s New York apartment: A single cloud moved through the blue sky … My eye was a glass box, and inside it there was no time. I kept the cloud inside it. I wish I could show it to you. I never imagined this could happen ...”

“... Ocean and the China Sea. These ships were very pretty things, with white painted upperworks, black hulls with red waterlines, yellow funnels and masts. (A version of this livery survives in the last royal yacht, Britannia, now moored as a museum piece in Edinburgh, and also on matchboxes.) The decks of this late Victorian Navy were holystoned ...”

“... virgin territory. The space had once been a community art venture called King Ubu, operated by the Black Mountain poet Robert Duncan and his collagist partner Jess Collins. Duncan, removing his clothes at the conclusion of his verse play Faust Foutu, in order to demonstrate the meaning of nakedness, anticipated by a decade or so the Ginsberg party trick that ...”

“... position where I can consummate the ordeal by the further ordeal of writing it.’ He never did. Michael Hofmann’s The Voyage That Never Ends is not Malcolm Lowry’s, but it puts us as close as anything can to being in a position to assess whether Lowry’s ‘Life Work’, unconsummated and fragmentary as it is, really does have the unity he claimed for ...”