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“... and curve and tenor’ of the sky is poetry, you’ll like Romer. Certain phrases suggest that Wallace Stevens is the azure sea in which he would like to swim. But he has none of the rigour nor the glassy brilliance of Stevens’s impalpable lexicon. This, from the end of ‘Serenissima’, is typical: I decided my only hope in the universe that day was ...”

“... Mort’ – Doxy, oh! thy glaziers shine   As glimmars by the Salomon! – and that, by William Walsh’s namby-pamby pseudo-pastoral, ‘The Despairing Lover’: Distracted with care For Phillis the fair, Since nothing could move her, Poor Damon the lover ... The three together liven each other up splendidly, and give a real sense of the ...”

“... in Panama with the indigenous people there rather than continue to sail north with the explorer William Dampier, thought the cultivation methods worth reporting: ‘the Indians set them’ – banana trees – ‘in rows or walks, without under-wood; and they make very delightful groves. They cut them down to get at the fruit; and the Bodies being green and ...”

“... He continued to educate himself, through books and journals as well as visits to museums (the Wallace Collection made a strong impression), and the commercial galleries that were becoming so influential. Naturally, he entered the ambit of dealers like Duveen, but he expected favourable prices and generous terms, occasionally dangling the possibility of ...”

“... ambivalence thesis. Did liberal England die with the passing of the Aliens Act? Novels by Edgar Wallace and Violet Guttenberg – The Four Just Men (1905) and A Modern Exodus (1904) – implicitly warned that the Act meant the collapse of the principles that defined the 19th-century liberal state, principles summarised by Glover as ‘civic ...”

“... in the wee hours after drinking at a pub. They also go to predictable and even boring places: Wallace Stevens’s house (he didn’t die there); Emily Dickinson’s homestead (she did); William Carlos Williams’s Rutherford home (where the famous icebox was, they point out); Elizabeth Bishop’s last residence on ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... writers when the subject finds himself among the sons of the East Coast establishment, from William Burroughs of St Louis to Norman Mailer, the Brooklyn Jew. The Lampoon officers recognised the worker in the ‘cultural bumpkin’: he could put out the magazine single-handed while everyone else was horsing around and drinking, a vice Updike hardly ever ...”

“... and endured. Wolff sidestepped Postmodern elders such as John Barth, Robert Coover, Guy Davenport, William Gass, Harry Mathews, Paul Metcalf, Gilbert Sorrentino, Ronald Sukenick and Paul West, as well as their heirs, such as T. Coraghessan Boyle, Lydia Davis, Rick Moody, William Vollmann and David Foster ...”

“... translators, notably the English Arabist Edward Lane, whose three-volume edition, illustrated with William Harvey’s fine steel engravings, was published between 1838 and 1841. I have a copy of this translation, which came from my great-grandfather’s library, and it’s one of the few books I owned as a child and have been reading ever since. Despite ...”

“... took him to see the film of A Midsummer Night’s Dream, directed by Max Reinhardt and William Dieterle. Ashbery, who would be captivated by film throughout his life, was transported by the combination of Shakespeare’s language and Mendelssohn’s music. When he arrived back at his grandparents’ house he immediately went upstairs and composed a ...”

“... developed in several of the chapters.’ The defence sounds like an academic version of Wallace Stevens’s poetic project of arriving at insights through circularities rather than continuities of exploration, repeated affrays from various angles which precede the homing-in. McGann himself looks to Blake, whose ‘habit of returning to the same ...”

“... innovation of constructing an interlocking system of classes, terms and names was so significant, William Whewell argued in his Philosophy of the Inductive Sciences (1840), that modern systemic science could be said to begin with Linnaeus. Whewell wrote at a time when a wide variety of new lexical systems had been accepted as the matrices of scientific ...”

“... work whilst men and women unite in joyous and creative human pastimes. It is a prospect to make William Morris’s mind reel, publishers quail. But who are, or were, the Khazars? ‘An autonomous and powerful tribe, a warlike and nomadic people who appeared from the East at an unknown date, driven by a scorching silence, and who, from the seventh to the ...”

“... and with different timbres, this refrain has been part of the Joe McCarthy movement, the George Wallace campaign and every Republican surge from Nixon to Gingrich. (But let’s not be too partisan about it; the rhetoric evolved from the days when the Ku Klux Klan and the Southern Democratic Party were each other’s official and provisional wings.) As ...”