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“... all those immaculate photos in the Sunday Supplements, and the effective paragraphs from the field with their details chilling or bizarre. Perhaps it could not and should not do so? Poetry cannot sever itself entirely from the most oppressive literary manifestations of its time, but it must use them with its own sort of detachment (as Larkin used ...”

“... fable, which on its way has the power to burst into flame. In the name of its awful majesty I will go down with willing torments into the grave.   I will go down, and rise again on the third day, and as boats float on the river, the centuries like a caravan of barges shall float out of the darkness to me for ...”

“... want to talk to talk to everybody I can as deeply as I can. I want to be able to sleep in an open field, to travel west, to walk freely at night.At 17, she had told her journal: ‘I think I would like to call myself “The girl who wanted to be God”.’ And she would retain this intensity across her whole career. When I first read Plath at 17, though I ...”

“... with its atmosphere of electioneering and death, brings to mind the insistent taps of Robert Lowell’s ‘For the Union Dead’: The stone statues of the abstract Union Soldier grow slimmer and younger each year – wasp-waisted, they doze over muskets and muse through their sideburns. Senator John Forbes Kerry, the nominee, didn’t spring like that ...”

“... just one race here. It is American.’ The rules of colour-blind equality and the ‘level playing-field’, as they came to be outlined in the 1980s and 1990s, created a climate in which affirmative action came to look like reverse racism: unacceptably discriminatory against whites. With structural injustice presented as a thing of the past, what appeared to ...”

“... de I’Opéra, had been published in 1926. How Benjamin’s project would escape from the force-field of Aragon and Surrealism was not clear at the start. Would it be an essay or prose poem or full-scale book? There are drafts and sketches dating from 1928-29 for something Benjamin was calling ‘Paris Arcades: A Dialectical Fairyland’; but already much ...”