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“... forgiven for that. Karl was much given to leaving – ‘more of a born leaver’, he said of Robert Lowell, whose wife had made the mistake of calling him ‘a born joiner’. He started at the Treasury, had a short stint in television; became literary editor first of the Spectator, then the Statesman; joined the Listener as editor in 1967 and the ...”

“... the little girl sang, ‘Each morning I am something new ...’ Schwartz’s literary executor, Robert Philips, thinks this is one of Schwartz’s permanent contributions to 20th-century American poetry, but I don’t think he can be serious. There are occasional strikes, such as ‘Mr Seurat’s Sunday Afternoon’, and he never lost his gift for good ...”

“... influenza. If he struck many of those who met him, from Alfred Jarry to Max Jacob to Picasso to Robert Delaunay, as larger than life, as the avant-garde spirit incarnate, and if his long poems, like those of Whitman and O’Hara, seem to expand and prolong themselves as effortlessly as amoebas in a petri dish, then beneath the shifting decors and personae a ...”

“... of her first novel, Wise Blood. Her friend Sally Fitzgerald, the wife of the poet and translator Robert Fitzgerald, broke the news, which effectively terminated all dreams of escaping Andalusia, the farm outside Milledgeville run by her mother. There O’Connor spent the last 12 years of her life, raising peacocks and writing ferocious stories populated by ...”

“... history of Westerns: Henry Nash Smith’s classic Virgin Land is redolent of New Deal optimism, Robert Warshow’s much anthologised essay ‘The Westerner’ is a précis of Cold War concerns, Leslie Fiedler’s Return of the Vanishing American rescripts the West in countercultural terms and Richard Slotkin’s vast Gunfighter Nation is haunted by ...”

“... wealthier neighbours on the edge of Chicago, through Congress and high office in the Nixon and Ford administrations, including a spell as secretary of defense, a profitable excursion into business, and finally six tumultuous years heading the Pentagon under George W. Bush. Oddly, Rumsfeld begins his memoir with an out-of-sequence account of his 1983 ...”

“... not one novel but two. The first is Hystopia, which was published by Faber and blurbed by Richard Ford and is being reviewed right here in front of your very eyes. The second is also called ‘Hystopia’, but this one, as that shift in typography suggests, purports to be a posthumously discovered manuscript by Eugene Allen, a young Vietnam veteran who ...”

“... to develop his vocabulary of repeated geometric forms. At home for Christmas, he found a copy of Robert Henri’s The Art Spirit (1923) in a flea market. Henri was the leader of the Ashcan School of artists, who portrayed everyday working-class scenes (his students included Edward Hopper); the book opens with the statement that ‘art when really understood ...”

“... not just as hero but as a kind of secular saint. Recalling the mild furore a few years ago over Robert Gittings’s life of Hardy, with its intimations that the great advocate of loving-kindness could be snobbish and mean-spirited, severe with his servants and a brute to his wife, one is bound to reflect that even today the faith is not quite ...”

“... Land, he said, was ‘neither a success nor a failure – simply a struggle’, and he teased Ford Madox Ford by telling him he thought there were ‘about thirty good lines in The Waste Land, can you find them?’ The poem has 434 lines. Ford thought the question was cruel, and said ...”

“... sheer unlikeliness of what he’s up to: Einstein bent the Universe     To make war obsolete. Ford swore his wished-for wheels would rush     The century off its feet. The Soviet Butcher Bird announced     The new age with a tweet.The butcherbird is in fact native to Australia, but that doesn’t stop Hughes punning on its name in his off-kilter ...”

“... of Metternich. As the architect of détente, Kissinger, who served under Nixon and Gerald Ford, first as national security adviser and, from 1973, as secretary of state as well, studiously avoided the moralism that had defined Washington’s position during the early Cold War. For him, the Soviet Union was not an existential evil that needed to be ...”

“... Raban attempts to probe beneath the rhetoric to the actual experience of these emigrants. Robert Louis Stevenson’s caustic characterisations of his fellow passengers in his marvellous The Amateur Emigrant are delightedly and extensively quoted as evidence of the real motivations behind the movement westwards: ‘We were a company of the ...”

“... Aeschylus’ own son, Euphorion. In the foreword to his 1967 prose version of Prometheus Bound, Robert Lowell noted that this play is ‘probably the most lyrical of the Greek classical tragedies’, but also ‘the most undramatic – one man, a sort of demigod at that, chained to a rock, orated to, and orating at, a sequence of embodied ...”

“... Rome, from the Middle Ages to the 19th century. The Dictionary is the brain-child of Sir Brinsley Ford, a collector of 17th and 18th-century art, a patron of living British painters, and in many ways a reincarnation of the ideal virtuoso and Grand Tourist. He was first drawn to the subject by the Roman landscapes of Richard Wilson; published a book on ...”