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“... His career began auspiciously in the early 1940s with the enthusiastic support of his hero Dylan Thomas, but the surrealism of his early collections, such as Cage without Grievance and 2ND Poems, seemed to mark him out as an oddity who could easily be ignored. The White Threshold in 1949 and The Nightfishing in 1955 made a conscious break with his earliest ...”

“... extremely good on the subject of getting older. In the book’s penultimate essay, ‘Find Your Beach’ – sparked by a Corona advert glimpsed from her window – she contrasts her English and American selves, capturing in a few lines the narcotic, death-defying exhilaration of New York City. ‘You are pure potential in Manhattan, limitless, you are ...”

“... In 1912 Frost moved his family to England and met many writers, including Yeats, Pound and Edward Thomas, who would become his closest friend. Before returning to America in 1915, he wrote home with some news: ‘To be perfectly frank with you I am one of the most notable craftsmen of my time. That will transpire presently.’ In their sharp-witted ...”

“... Ass is funny. The idea, as well as the drawing, of ‘The Right Hon. Dress Suit, wearing his Jimmy Thomas’ is funny. (George Lansbury said he could never again see Thomas without thinking of it.) Low was also remarkable for his good humour. This is exemplified in his Lloyd George, whom he never managed to draw as other ...”

“... and enterprise. Besides the crews of these vessels, every second person we saw was English; the beach, quays, streets and taverns (their keepers and servants also of the same nation) were crowded with them, bustling to and fro with the characteristic hurry of commercial business, and occasionally, it must be confessed, dealing out to each other, or to ...”

“... to them both and claims his bride, sure that she will wish to return with him to ‘the yellow beach of Akatan’. But she attempts to knife him, and dies in the snow with her dead, white ascendancy husband in her arms. Racial superiority has had its way, but has also been defeated. After incredible hardship the Indian gets back to a settlement, and tells ...”

“... Normandy, Sicily and Africa. His pictures of a falling Loyalist, of the D-Day landing at Omaha Beach, of a collaborator, her head shaved and a baby in her arms, being mocked by a French crowd, of a tired bomber pilot, a dead machine-gunner, and the crowds lining the streets of liberated Paris, put him in the small class of photographers whose images of ...”

“... seemed to resist were not Hecht’s Audenesque tendencies, but the further influence of Dylan Thomas and Hart Crane, who could not write without overwriting.Born in 1923 in New York City, Hecht had a privileged but disrupted childhood. His father worked at a fake job paid for by his father-in-law. The boy attended private schools, rarely thriving as a ...”

“... with questions of biography. Given the fates that overtook his colleagues Christopher Marlowe and Thomas Kyd in 1593 and 1594 – the one stabbed to death at 29, the other eventually dying after an extensive and painful interrogation – you could argue that Shakespeare might have felt that he had been living on borrowed time since the age of thirty. Ben ...”

“... sea. The cause of this unexpectedly low water was an uncharted sandbar – not the gently shelving beach, which still lay one hundred yards or more ahead. Somehow Kerr managed to find handholds on the ramp and cling on, dog-paddling with his feet, to allow the ship to carry him to the shore, where he was able to come out upright, shivering and sopping wet, and ...”

“... rocks and samples of soil, setting up experiments, and skipping around like two boys playing on a beach. The only thing missing is a sandcastle. Despite appearances, the coverage was never quite live. Nasa imposed a minute’s delay on the transmission of footage: viewers would be protected in the event of a disaster. The pictures from space were no less ...”

“... courage, the other fellow said, when they finished their drinks they would go down the hill to the beach for ‘the long swim to China’. But circumstances changed and they found themselves in a car with an American tourist heading north to Texas along a tortuous mountain road of hairpin turns. Tennessee was horrified to hear his despondent friend ask ‘if ...”

“... a friend of Vogel’s sister on Manhattan’s Upper West Side. In 1962, she ran into Vogel on the beach at Fire Island and walked him over to meet her writer husband. They hit it off. Vogel was the son of a successful New York building contractor, did not lack for money, tried a lot of things without ever settling on one thing in particular, made friends ...”

“... I just can’t see it. She’s elegant, composed, straight-backed. She’s in a tweedy suit on the beach, scowling at the sun, one hand in pocket, the other holding sunglasses, as if about to make some school-ma’amish point. She’s neat, both modern and quintessentially luxurious; dark hair pulled back into a bun, eyes like soft triangles, sweeping ...”

“... been made for his work. Fante has been compared to Dostoevsky, Knut Hamsun, Hemingway, Dos Passos, Thomas Wolfe, Steinbeck, James Farrell, William Saroyan and Nathanael West. In 1977, a Washington Post reviewer compared The Brotherhood of the Grape to The Brothers Karamazov and King Lear. Hyperbole aside, both Fante’s early novels are excellent ...”