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“... and Harold Bloom called it the most distinguished book of American poetry since Wallace Stevens’s Collected Poems came out in the mid-1950s. It was ‘a major imaginative event’, John Hollander said, and John Ashbery – in his first piece for the New York Review of Books – hailed Ammons as an ‘American original’. ‘I was born big and jaundiced ...”

“... Open Frank O’Hara’s Collected Poems at random, somewhere in the middle, and you may get what looks like a Post-It note to a friend, or versified notes on a Jackson Pollock painting, a James Dean movie or ‘the music of Adolphe Deutsch’. You may also get one of many enticing, informal, secretly-complex poems that sound like nobody else ever has: How can you start hating me when I’m so comfortable in your raincoat the apples kept bumping off the old gnarled banged-up biddy-assed tree and I kept ducking and hugging and bobbing as if you were a tub of water on Hallowe’en it was fun but you threw yourself into reverse like a tractor hugging the ground in spring that was nice too more rain more raincoat                                  (‘Adventures In Living’) Who was O’Hara, and how did he learn to write like that? Born in 1926, he grew up in small towns in Massachusetts, studied piano seriously throughout high school and served in the Navy at the close of World War II ...”

“... to imagine as a child. Nobody, surely, can have that problem with Boris Johnson. The mind’s eye sees Boris as one of Belloc’s Cautionary Tales, a bouncy fellow demanding his tea and laying plans ‘to be/the next Prime Minister but three’. But the mind’s eye can be wrong ...”

“... much,’ she says, opening her thumb and forefinger as wide as they will go.) The community’s point of reference is still Brighton Beach, where you won’t get far without Russian, but ‘Little Russia’ is taking over neighbouring areas and has outgrown the old image of greasy pirozhki stalls, pensioners playing chess on the boardwalk and tacky rag ...”

“... least, construction is irreversibly underway, despite general indignation over the disruption it’s caused and who stands to benefit most from it – the City. By 2018, 21 km of tunnel will have been dug, linking the Great Western line at Paddington to the Great Eastern at Whitechapel. We’ll have spent £15 billion, we’ll have seven new London train ...”

“... The​ early entries in Jean Lucey Pratt’s journals brought to mind Cecily’s diary in The Importance of Being Earnest, where Wilde sends up, among other things, the predictable script of boy meets girl. Long before she knows Algernon, Cecily has charted the progress of their romance in her diary, but when they meet, and Algernon falls instantly in love as planned, Cecily won’t let him read it: ‘Oh no ...”

“... Fenimore would not be added for another six years), the son of one of post-independence America’s wealthiest land speculators, to embark on a career in the dubious and unpredictable world of novel-writing. Almost nothing in Cooper’s life up until that year, in which he turned 31, indicates an interest in fiction, or in ...”

“... of a wedge-shaped field of corn. He is leaning against some sort of natural cushion, and it’s possible he is asleep, though he has a large book open in front of him so perhaps it’s just that his eyes are cast down to scrutinise its pages. But that would be difficult since it is ...”

“... Lewis Theobald’s Double Falsehood had its premiere at the Theatre Royal on Drury Lane on 13 December 1727. It was a romantic tragicomedy in a Spanish setting; the story was from an episode in Don Quixote. Theobald’s statement that it met with ‘universal applause’ is untrue, but it certainly created a buzz ...”

“... in 1951 came with an author photo taking up the entire rear panel of the dustjacket: Salinger’s expression is amused, generous, even sweet; the chances are good that he picked the portrait out himself from a set taken by the photographer Lotte Jacobi the previous year. But when the time came for later printings, with copies flying off the shelves, he ...”

“... the war, I was a writer. Today, on the ninth day, I feel unable to string two words together. It’s hard to believe that just over a week ago we were living a normal life. I have to try very hard to remember what that life was like.Those who survive will be able to reflect on it all. For the time being, our words are exalted, exaggerated; our shock, rage and ...”

“... the murdered 18-year-old victim of racism. The second, a cultural balloon with Stephen Lawrence’s image on it: a balloon so large there is barely any space left in which to think objectively about Lawrence, his murder and the subsequent investigations and Inquiry. These are the undisputed facts. Stephen Lawrence was ...”

“... for praising the Germans for their tenacity in going on with them. I have written about the so-called ‘revisionists’, who obscenely wish to deny the existence of the gas-chambers – and was criticised for upholding their right to voice these irrational opinions. I have battled in print against people like ...”

“... point of crisis. The party in power, whose late 20th-century figurehead, Margaret Thatcher, did so much to create the problem, is responding by separating off the economically least powerful and squeezing them into the smallest, meanest, most insecure possible living space. In effect, if not in explicit intention, it is a let-the-poor-be-poor crusade, a ...”

“... portrait of Sir Thomas Gresham looks like an Edwardian tinted photograph, and with the sitter so eerily present not entirely pleasing. All art is tiring and these paintings in particular as they’re crowded with detail and every dress and doublet draws you in to trace the embroidery or work out the folds and flourishes. The poster for the exhibition is ...”