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“... the time, as Borges reminds us in a marvellous essay on FitzGerald, when ‘on an island to the north and west that is unknown to the cartographers of Islam, a Saxon king who defeated a king of Norway is defeated by a Norman duke.’ Khayyám’s work on cubic equations remains fundamental. It seems it was a sideline, versifying. Composing quatrains was a ...”

“... the other? It’s unclear. He enrolled in the Ali Akbar Khan College of Music and studied the North Indian classical tradition: strange new tunings and mind-expanding microtones. The discipline of repetition, the rigour of improvisation. Quiet that intrusive ego! You don’t ‘make’ music, you prepare to let it arrive. The first public performance of ...”

“... in insurance; wife and daughter; quiet life in Hartford, Connecticut; never travelled outside North America; the usual run of prizes towards the end of his life. I’ve never felt the need for a biography. And now that I’ve read this one by Mariani, a serial biographer of poets (he has notched already, among Americans, Williams, Crane, Lowell and ...”

“... life investigating. Bishop, one suspects, knew rather more about real birds than Shelley did; like Marianne Moore, she prided herself on her ability to capture the feel of different species through accurate observation: Black-and-white man-of-war birds soar on impalpable drafts and open their tails like scissors on the curves or tense them like ...”

“... much the same applies to the campaign currently being waged by what Michael Heseltine calls ‘our North American press’ – that is to say, the Murdoch and Black empires – against Britain forging closer ties in Europe. As Conrad Black has lived here for a dozen years, obviously cares about the country and does not own a British tabloid, it is a little ...”

“... life Flannery O’Connor lived with her mother, having been forced by illness to return from the North, where she had intended to stay and write. Regina’s own taste in books ran to something that had Frank Buck in it and a lot of wild animals. Her father, who died of lupus when Flannery was 15, had been a real-estate man with some kind of interest in ...”

“... the Nauset beaches? Who would? Yet she pulls it off, and we are slack-jawed and mildly horrified. Marianne Moore would say that she is ‘too unrelenting’ in The Colossus, her first book of poems; Robert Lowell would put the same thought another way by saying that in Ariel she was playing ‘Russian Roulette with six cartridges in the cylinder’. I also ...”

“... figure of the French state symbol on the chamber wall above his ceremonial chair. “There is Marianne,” said he with another cautious smile but with an echo of laughter in his voice, “and here are we. She so white, and we so black.” ’ From the outset of his career as a journalist in Africa, Davidson has found much to say about the ...”

“... of the Choicest Lyrics and Short Poems in the English Language’. Allingham, who came from the north of Ireland, included living and American poets in his anthology, whose introduction presents its contents as ‘a jewel’, creations that serve, in Allingham’s Emersonian phrase, ‘to brighten the sunshine’. Palgrave’s ‘golden treasury’ seeks to ...”

“... of the people’, the construction of the Myitsone dam, a vast and destructive Chinese project in north-east Burma, would be suspended. Then in October two hundred political prisoners were released, followed by 651 more in January, among them Burma’s most famous and long incarcerated dissidents. A festival of independent film took place in Rangoon organised ...”

“... In the year he died, Cornell remembered that he sent one of his boxes to a starlet called Sheree North, but never heard from her. When Audrey Hepburn gave a performance as Ondine in New York in 1954, he sent her one of his owl boxes in tribute. She had it sent back to his home. Tilly Losch, the international good-time girl, and a recipient of Cornell’s ...”

“... visual art, he began to form his poetic style during the 1910s; soon he was mixing with Marianne Moore, Mina Loy, Alfred Kreymborg, Alfred Stieglitz and other Modernist artists and writers in Manhattan. His local practice thrived (he later specialised in paediatrics), but still he found time during the next few decades to produce a vast body of ...”

“... self-assertion. In the age of post-Revolutionary national movements, Mary becomes an analogue of Marianne (emblem of her people’s liberty, for whom the fraternal citizenry are willing to shed their blood), or even of Marie-Antoinette (personification of her country’s violated old order, to be defended by a thousand chivalric swords). Either way, The ...”

“... to Charles Monteith, his worldly editor at Faber and Faber, as a ‘simple ploughboy from the north’, which he certainly wasn’t. In his bouncy Memoirs of the Forties (1965), Julian Maclaren-Ross offers a memorable portrait of Graham brooding over his pint, a man with whom it was impossible to get things right, ‘not unpleasant, just inordinately ...”

“... more clarity is desirable. In his note for ‘My Cats’, May refers to Smith’s aside about the North Berwick witch trials, but doesn’t give a variant: in the printed version, the witch likes to ‘ruffle up his pride/And watch him skip and turn aside’; in performance, she watched the cat ‘spit’, not ‘skip’. You want to be reminded of Smith’s ...”