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“... struggling to get his charge to learn more and drink less, the whole truth. David Stevenson and William Sandys, tutors to Lewisham and Basset, emerge as significant characters with important contacts and interests of their own. Piranesi dedicated a print to Sandys while Stevenson is depicted with Lewisham among the crowd of cognoscenti admiring works of art ...”

“... wife is holding a grudge, of which the history is as follows: we once went together to a Tennessee Williams revival (Orpheus Descending, I think) in which poor Vanessa Redgrave had to deliver, in a lush but uncertain approximation to a Southern accent, some such line as: ‘Evera time ah walk past the graveyahd, ah can heah all those dead people ...”

“... of making ‘daily life itself a dignity and a sufficiency’ was to some extent prefigured by William CarlosWilliams’s Paterson, which, like The Maximus Poems, explores the historical layers and quotidian rituals of an average American town. Olson differs from ...”

“... paper. In the messier room across the hall, Karlheinz Stockhausen untunes a synthesiser, while William Burroughs randomly folds and cuts up his prose, and Robert Rauschenberg pushes a stuffed goat through an old tyre. That all these are denatured versions of Modernist practice is something Christopher Butler recognises. But, at least at the start of the ...”

“... and the work of the poet is the life of the poet.’ This is Oscar Wilde as rewritten by Tennessee Williams. The author of that gruesome playlet must have had in mind the notorious Algerian meeting near the fin de siecle in which Wilde, holding Bosie’s hand, boasted before a timid André Gide of having put all his genius into his life (looking at Bosie) but ...”

“... winter for years’); the frequent cut-away for exposition or meditation (‘The late Robin Williams, in his role as the inspirational English teacher in Dead Poets Society, has his pupils gather round a faded photo… “Carpe diem, boys”’), then the cutting back; the cameos (‘At the junction of Fitzroy Road and Chalcot Road we meet the poet Jo ...”

“... wet palate. He bites my hand. As I read this scene, and others like it, I found myself thinking of William CarlosWilliams’s story ‘The Use of Force’, in which a country doctor attempts to examine a young girl’s throat, checking for diphtheria. She resists; he forces her. There’s no question of the necessity ...”

“... There was a strong documentary element in much late Modernist American writing, and epics such as William CarlosWilliams’s Paterson or Charles Olson’s Maximus Poems (set in Gloucester, Massachusetts) are in essence enormous collages that attempt to capture the spirit of a place by combining ...”

“... six years before while supervising a Work Projects Administration programme. She had had a copy of William CarlosWilliams’s In the American Grain at the corner of her desk, which she had bought so she’d have something to read on the long subway ride to and from work. The couple had a son, Paul, in 1943, a musical ...”

“... poems in the magazine.Subsequently other people became stalwarts of a kind, didn’t they? Hugo Williams?Oh, they came in. David Harsent was another.Peter Dale?I think we published some of his poems. He never became quite one of the gang. There was a certain amount of indecision about him then. David Harsent appeared from nowhere. I think via the TLS. I was ...”

“... for authority. Ginsberg often claims to have issued indirectly from Whitman’s and directly from William CarlosWilliams’s overcoat: but Williams’s presence of mind in language is quite different from Ginsberg’s, and his poems are far more fully composed. Most of Ginsberg’s ...”

“... children, were elaborate cakes and the latest iPhone.She was fond of a quote she’d found from William Golding. ‘I think women are foolish to pretend they are equal to men,’ it said. ‘They are far superior and always have been.’ Most of the women thought this was a bit untrue, but Rania was very much herself. When her brother-in-law Tariq became ...”