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“... to himself as he was to most other writers, including some he certainly did learn from, like Ford Madox Ford, Gertrude Stein and Sherwood Anderson. Yet very good writers, including Ford and Pound and Joyce, recognised Hemingway’s gifts, the serious gifts about which he never ...”

“... can’t stop drinking, and in ‘(Florida Revisited)?’ the moon can’t stop crying. Both poems peter out in a mood of gloomy, resigned self-hatred that registers like a bitter penance for the poet’s impulsive reaching for ‘feather-light’ wood and the stocking on their respective beaches. The imagery of ‘(Florida Revisited)?’ in particular recalls ...”

“... The Bronze Horseman of Pushkin’s famous poem is Falconet’s equestrian statue of Peter the Great in St Petersburg. It was ordered by Catherine the Great (Petro primo Catharina secunda). Modelled on the statue of Marcus Aurelius in Rome, it was meant to evoke the wise emperor extending a main protectrice. Joseph de Maistre commented that one doesn’t know whether this hand protects or threatens ...”

“... and election, the operations of inscrutable, perhaps divine, plots. Theodore Dreiser, reviewing Ford Madox Ford’s The Good Soldier, said that if he’d had a chance to advise Ford he would have told him how to avoid obscurity and muddle: begin the story at the beginning and continue ...”

“... Number ten in the Unwin Critical Library, Peter Makin’s book is very good. No one can say with any confidence that it will attract new readers to Pound ’s immense poem; and in fact one of its great virtues is that it doesn’t try to minimise how difficult The Cantos is, and always will be. The difficulties are of three kinds: first, those inseparable from the nature of the enterprise (i ...”

“... Peter Ackroyd’s new novel is partly a narrative, partly a series of rhapsodies and meditations on the nature of English culture, written in the styles of various great authors. It is an important and a depressing book, its importance more or less in direct proportion to the depth of the gloom it sheds. With luck we may one day look back on it as the last ‘English’ novel ...”

“... real estate was cheap, plentiful and luring the likes of Tom McGuane, Tim Cahill, Jeff Bridges, Peter Fonda and the late Seymor Lawrence. Frontier towns like Livingston and Boulder Creek are today about as close as you can get to a nursing home for Sixties’ veterans and survivors of the more recent Hollywood filmscript wars – complete with a beanery in ...”

“... a few lines on one side of it; Moore’s vast archive of unpublished poetry was drawn on by Peter Riley for two posthumous collections, Lacrimae Rerum (1988) and Longings of the Acrobats (1990), but for the most part sleeps undisturbed in the Cambridge University Library. Moore’s few, but fervent, admirers are hoping that a fresh Selected to be ...”

“... out to be more fickle than science allows for. Milton has been advised by his chiropractor friend Peter Takakis, who is around for the family’s traditional Sunday afternoon open-house debating session, that – since male sperm swim faster than female sperm – a couple, to have a baby girl, ‘should have sexual congress 24 hours prior to ovulation’. The ...”

“... pupil,’ Lyttelton says. The Lord Chamberlain, Eric Penn? ‘He was in my house.’ Sir Edward Ford? ‘He is my cousin.’ Sir Michael Adeane! ‘He is my wife’s cousin.’ The Queen Mother? ‘She was a great friend, before marriage, of my wife’s.’ For Hart-Davis, naturally, it is more a question of active connections, with authors, other ...”

“... have appealed much to Leavis either, but they do offer graphic additional proof in support of Peter Ackroyd’s assertion in his 1984 biography of Eliot that ‘when he allowed his sexuality free access, when he was not struggling with his own demons, it was of a heterosexual kind’: When my tall girl sits astraddle on my lap, She with nothing on and I ...”

“... the fields in headscarves and trousers). What survived of these literary efforts was my mother’s Ford, AUP 595, which lived as a shrouded mystery, under dust sheets and an old blanket, in the wooden garage in our back garden, until the German surrender, when petrol rationing was reintroduced for private motorists. It was a black saloon, with upholstered ...”

“... can be seen as a consequence of a number of particular events. There was an invitation to give the Ford Lectures, which had to be on English history. He wrote The Troublemakers as a result, a study of those ‘dissenters’, as he termed them, Fox and Cobden and Bright and Hobson and all the stage army of the good, who had criticised British foreign policy as ...”

“... and among the answers to Einstein’s remark about God not playing dice is one from Joseph Ford: ‘He does, but they are loaded.’ Gleick and Regis both tell their stories using the common science writer’s mix of biographical sketch, exposition and quotation. They are lucky to have such stories, and readers are lucky that they tell them so ...”

“... Chichester, visits by Samuel Pepys, location work for the latest Jane Austen or for Harrison Ford (more bombs) in Patriot Games – are trumpeted, while the dark history of the Greenwich marshes, a decayed industrial wilderness, is brutally elided. The tongue of poisoned land, a couple of miles to the east of the Royal Naval College (film set, banqueting ...”