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“... But as Russell Banks points out in the preface to The Hurly Burly, Eudora Welty, Elizabeth Bowen, Robert Frost and Carl Sandburg had led a campaign on Coppard’s behalf. In the 1970s, he had another revival in the UK after a couple of his stories were adapted for television and Lessing put together a selection. But by the 1980s, in the Dirty Realist era of ...”

“... and thought a lot about the nature of art and how it might be taught, and in his catalogue essay Robert Kudielka turns to the writings for explanations. In hers, Bridget Riley tells how they have informed her own thinking about abstract painting. Yet despite its aphoristic power (the expression ‘taking a line for a walk’ suggests so much about drawing ...”

“... Elvira – nor to pity her. Stead’s greatest moral quality as a novelist is her lack of pity. As Blake said, Pity would be no more, If we did not make somebody poor, and, for Stead, pity is otiose, a self-indulgent luxury that obscures the real nature of our relations with our kind. To disclose that real nature has always been her ...”

“... and is also part of a vigorous poetic and critical counter-culture. His work sends critics to Blake or Wordsworth or Coleridge as often as it propels them to the OED in search of what Beckett called ‘semantic succour’; it is as likely to draw us back to the Metaphysical poets, to Hardy or to Herrick as it is to refer us to Heidegger, Bakhtin or ...”

“... his work, Kathleen Raine wrote, is ‘like standing under a waterfall in full spate’. Like Blake or Stanley Spencer, Redgrove was a great English visionary eccentric whose way of seeing mixed sexuality with a powerful sense of ritual. Born in Kingston upon Thames in 1932, he spent most of his boyhood in a newly built detached suburban house. Its ...”

“... moment in a verbal contest, a gaudy, point scoring mockery against the serious-mindedness of Sir Robert Peel or, later, Gladstone. Byron’s is itinerant, physical, and (perhaps most distinctively) shuns the maternal and the doting for the anti-familial, for the generosity of pure sexual scandal. Disraeli, hermaphroditically gliding between his exotic ...”

“... It seemed to be happening only yesterday, but Blake Morrison was born in 1950, and for him the Movement is something you have to work on in a library. So it suddenly comes to seem rather remote, as deep in the past as those files of the Spectator where he found the famous pieces by J.D. Scott and Anthony Hartley, or the scripts of John Wain’s Third Programme magazine First Reading, or copies of the Reading limited editions of Wain and Amis ...”

“... the 1950s, edited by D.J. Enright, appeared in 1955, followed a year later by New Lines, edited by Robert Conquest. Enright’s volume contained work by eight poets: Robert Conquest, D.J. Enright, Kingsley Amis, Donald Davie, John Holloway, Elizabeth Jennings, Philip Larkin and John Wain, to which list Conquest’s volume ...”

“... news from England in the summer of 1832. We should not be beguiled by the calm portraits of Sir Robert Peel or his heavy, measured prose. He led his party through times much more violent than our own. During a time of tumultuous social change he fundamentally changed its direction. Historians rightly advise us against overdramatising particular events. But ...”

“... Columbia Records released King of the Delta Blues Singers – a collection of tracks by Robert Johnson – in 1961, it was the first time in decades that more than a handful of people had access to more than a handful of songs by any country bluesman. Bob Dylan got an acetate from his producer, John Hammond, and played it for his mentor, Dave Van ...”

“... are given for each poet, but they are little help: a poem by Sandro Penna (1906-77) translated by Blake Robinson on page 66 seems close to some lines by Giuseppe Ungaretti (1888-1970) translated by Marcus Perryman and Peter Robinson on page 38: but is there really an echo? If so, which way does it run? And is it in the originals or only in the ...”

“... Delmore Schwartz, Truman Capote (on Kerouac: ‘that’s not writing, that’s type-writing’), Robert Brustein and James Dickey (‘Howl is the skin of Rimbaud’s Une Saison en Enfer thrown over the conventional maunderings of one type of American adolescent, who has discovered that machine civilisation has no interest in his having read ...”

“... them, get beyond archaeological evidence and inference, bypass the fevered imagination of William Blake’s and John Martin’s Bible illustrations and hear the voice of a Mesopotamian Pepys? Well, not exactly, but the range and character of what is written down give some idea of the texture of everyday life in Nebuchadnezzar’s Babylon. The majority of ...”

“... George Barker and Edith Sitwell. Less than a decade later, with those roses seen as over-blown, Robert Conquest was deploring ‘the omission of the necessary intellectual component from poetry’, gathering several disparate writers under one umbrella, and announcing the striking out of New Lines. The Movement was succeeded by the Group (now what was ...”

“... of high culture. An authorised biography has now appeared of an English dealer of recent memory, Robert Fraser, 1937-86. His chequered career, terminated by Aids, lasted as long as it did only because of subsidies from his parents and getting away with not paying his debts, while the world at large remembers him for pictures showing him in a police van ...”