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“... shall hardly be a ‘self’ at all.Among Creeley’s early correspondents were Charles Olson and William Carlos Williams, who served, somewhat, as father figures. His actual father, a doctor, died when Creeley was four, after which the family’s fortunes took a serious downturn. Creeley first wrote to Williams in February 1950, soliciting work for a small ...”

“... a former rebel and friendly pamphleteering rival of Defoe’s – described how two brothers, William and Benjamin Hewling, who had fought at Sedgemoor, fled by sea but ‘were driven back again, and with the hazard of their lives got on shore (over dangerous rocks), where they saw the country filled with soldiers, and they being unwilling to fall into ...”

“... to play Nora in The Doll’s House would never be fulfilled without recourse to surgery. Dorothy Parker sniffed that she had cut off her nose to spite her race, but Brice was just trying to enlarge her repertoire. Things may be thought different now: Barbra Streisand has climbed the heights of Hollywood stardom without a nose job. Her big movie ...”

“... Van Dine’s famous aesthete-sleuth – polo player, expert in Chinese ceramics, former student of William James – whom Raymond Chandler regarded as ‘the most asinine character in detective fiction’, and on some level that’s probably the point. (‘I’m not Sherlock Holmes or Philo Vance,’ Marlowe says later on.) Even so, it’s surprising that ...”

“... even distractions from it, rival it in interest and passion. It reminds me a little of William Gass’s tiny masterpiece, In the Heart of the Heart of the Country (‘and I am in retirement from love’), which I imagine Lydia Davis must have known; and a little, too, of Botho Strauss’s novella Die Widmung, which hardly anyone knows in ...”

“... on his own work or even to lead his readers through a particular poem. Valéry, Allen Tate, William Empson, John Crowe Ransom, Robert Penn Warren and Robert Lowell were instructive in that way. But it is rare for a poet to lead readers through a poem, draft by draft, or explain how he settled for one word rather than another. Yeats did not offer to ...”

“... public places – magenta Rugosa roses in odd corners, yellow standard roses in our square garden, William Allen Richardson pink climbers on the pergola overlooking the crematorium, favourite meeting place for nursemaids and prams. (“There goes another poor soul!” as a column of brown smoke rose in the still air.)’ This passage not only shows Jean ...”

“... of all Byron’s doxies’. He quotes Byron’s own reminiscence of his cousin, Margaret Parker, ‘one of the most beautiful of evanescent beings’, only to round off the paragraph by observing that Margaret Parker ‘took evanescence to the limit by dying’. Biographer and subject could hardly be closer in step ...”

“... we have come to expect: ‘Christina ... began writing with her 22-carat gold broad-nibbed Parker Duofold pen.’ The artful book-jacket keys us in: a string of pearls, a pair of sunglasses, four wedding rings for four farcical marriages; a scarlet lipstick; the dented tops of two bottles of Diet Coca-Cola. (Diet Coke was Christina’s favourite ...”

“... from his voyage aboard the whaler Acushnet in 1841-42 and from authoritative texts ranging from William Scoresby’s Account of the Arctic Regions (1820), through encyclopedia entries, to Frederick Bennett’s Narrative of a Whaling Voyage round the Globe (1840). King tests this information against up-to-the-minute data from modern marine science. It turns ...”

“... and Margaret Biddulph, Rodmarton was finished in 1929, having been built over thirty years on William Morris principles of handwork. The materials were local as were the builders and furnishers, who produced joinery for the timber framing, needlework and metalwork. It was a reinvention of the country house as social force, ‘a quiet attempt to change the ...”

“... had persisted in acquittals against the clearest instructions from the judge. Indeed, in Rex v. William Hone (1818) the jurors had been intimidated by a rabble laughing aloud in court! The Lord Chief Justice, Ellenborough, had himself given the jury an exemplary charge: ‘in obedience to his conscience and his God, he pronounced this to be a most impious ...”

“... It was completed after his death (in 1852) by another architectural historian, John Henry Parker, who also drew on it for Our English Home: Its Early History and Progress (1860). Despite this encouraging start, the emergence in the later 19th and early 20th centuries of modern history as a university subject did nothing to advance the study of ...”

“... name for my own blueberry-loving toddler than the jubilant More Fruit. In 1603 the antiquary William Camden cited the new practice among the gentry of using surnames as first names, pointing to Grevill Varney, Bassingburne Gawdy and Calthorp Parker: ‘Although many dislike it, for the great inconvenience that will ...”

“... clerk at Helpston in Northamptonshire. In the early 1760s, she had a relationship with John Donald Parker, an itinerant Scottish fiddler and teacher who was working in the village school. On discovering she was pregnant, he disappeared and was never heard of again. Her son was christened for the absent father, and became a talented traditional singer, a gift ...”