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“... so on. A truly terrible essay in Lodge’s collection Write on, in which he attends a Shakin’ Stevens teenybop gig ‘struck by the Christian symbolism permeating the whole event’, suggests he was right not to push his luck with Sheldrake’s musings, even for comic purposes. An American art critic featured on a recent TV documentary about Madonna and ...”

“... laureate, Rabindranath Tagore. Like many American poets, including Ginsberg but also Eliot and Stevens, Ashbery and O’Hara, they were galvanised by modern French poetry. Like the Surrealists, they issued their own magazine (called Krittibas) and manifestos under the collective name ‘the Hungry Generation’ (later the ‘Hungryalists’). But, like ...”

“... James, Hardy, Meredith and Trollope. It isn’t that there haven’t been other subjects; Wallace Stevens, in particular, recurs in all Miller’s work, and he has also written about various writers of the post-Victorian century, including philosophers and critics. But 19th-century authors have continued, through every other change, to provide him with matter ...”

“... got to be at Toggers or something. I hated all that. But I had a very nice housemaster – George Lyttelton of the dreaded Letters – who allowed me to educate myself. He thought it was rather amusing that I was reading Proust, though he didn’t think it was a frightfully good idea. I was always, as a child, fascinated by things considered unsuitable ...”

“... only was Tissot the more successful, but so were two of Degas’s other painter-friends, Alfred Stevens and Giuseppe de Nittis. There was also the case of Giovanni Boldini, who had first made his name as a portrait painter in London before moving to Paris in 1871. Stevens’s fame was based equally in Brussels and ...”

“... he appeared in Alida Monro’s anthology Recent Poetry in 1933 alongside Yeats, Eliot, Auden and George Barker. Then, on leaving school, he published a novel, Opening Day, and before long his work could be found in the small magazines of his time such as Geoffrey Grigson’s New Verse and his friend Roger Roughton’s Contemporary Poetry and Prose, Browsing ...”

“... New York, the South or the West. It has often been said that Isabel Archer is an imitation of George Eliot’s Dorothea Brooke, but it is apparent from all the novels of James which have no resemblance to Middlemarch, and from their Emersonian echoes, that The Portrait of a Lady could have brought the theme of aspiration to the point it does without the ...”

“... not imminent appearance of a poet for whom none of all that held any magnetism. A new Auden, a new Stevens might have seemed to be the answer, and shortly there were indeed new Audens, new Stevenses to choose from. But neither intellectualism nor playfulness nor mere perfection of technique would be enough to reclaim glamour for the impersonal, or ...”

“... the candles blowing out at the table in the main dining-room where Douglas Dillon and his wife and George Ball and his wife and Robert McNamara and Arthur Schlesinger are sitting (not eating, no dinner has arrived, no dinner will arrive), the pale linen curtains in the main dining-room blowing out, the rain on the parquet floor, the isolation, the ...”

“... recent history have magnified the court’s profile; its partisan contortions in favour of George W. Bush in the case of Bush v. Gore decided the 2000 presidential election. But nothing has done more to push the court into the public eye than abortion. In Britain abortion was legalised as a result of David Steel’s Abortion Bill of 1967, but in the US ...”

“... Wearing’, for example, has an American icon in every line (from Abraham Lincoln to Dick Tracy to George III). ‘Sleeping with Women’, whose lines contain its title, puts its sex and somnolence in as many (often very fetching) horizontal positions as it can, until it finally nods off. Such methods lend themselves to collaboration. ‘Crone ...”

“... suicide note. I have never been so cheerily suicidal, so sui-Seidel. I am too cheery to be well. George Bush is cheery as well. I am cheeriest Crawling around on all fours eating gentle grass And pretending I am eating broken glass. Then I throw up the pasture. Both Plath and Lowell practised something like this detonation of historical pain in the service ...”

“... who’s documented in the region was marrying someone else fifty miles away in 1924. A stepfather, George Williams, was quickly found and the family weathered the Great Depression on his earnings as a janitor at the post office, a job that was made secure by New Deal investment in their hometown, Wichita Falls. Greatly impressed by Ronald Colman as Sydney ...”

“... be seen with a club in his hand – but Obama was not most presidents. His immediate predecessor, George W. Bush, loved the game but felt he ought to give it up after 9/11, in case it seemed frivolous to be on the golf course when he was sending soldiers into battle. Obama was not so self-denying. Ben Rhodes describes what happened when news came through in ...”

“... Milton, Johnson, Goethe (Aristocratic Age); Wordsworth, Austen, Whitman, Dickinson, Dickens, George Eliot, Tolstoy, Ibsen (Democratic Age); and Freud, Proust, Joyce, Woolf (Orlando), Kafka, Borges, Neruda and Pessoa, Beckett (Chaotic Age). As you might expect, these essays are opinionated, sometimes contrary, and often very good. On Shakespeare he is ...”