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“... an ‘Age of Boswell’ to the 20th century. This second volume of the grand Frederick Pottle-Frank Brady biography marks the climax of that long achievement. Climax, but not end: in some country-house loft or uncleared bank vault, I would bet, lies the huge bundle which is the missing Johnson-Boswell correspondence. But that discovery, if and when ...”

“... account of Boswell’s later life which was published six years ago by one of the present editors, Frank Brady – is the worse for its author’s frustrations, prostrations and despairs, interesting though he can sometimes make them appear; it conveys what can often seem like a bitter end for the likely lad from Ayrshire; Boswell’s last legs are apt to ...”

“... journalists, gossip-columnists and even critics), he was possibly the least culpable. Even Brady, an admirer, in his exhaustive and occasionally exhausting coverage, fails from time to time to set the record straight aggressively enough, and falls victim to what we should regard as the received malice. Although an admirer, ...”

“... of the poems in Early Works have a chatty, diurnal music that can also be heard in the work of Frank O’Hara or John Ashbery. Ashbery’s notion of the poem as ‘the chronicle of the creative act that produces it’ is a good description of Notley’s shapely, improvisatory poetics – full of changing weather, changing clothes, the impressions of the ...”

“... also had two children). Di Prima wrote plays, acted, directed and produced. They put on dramas by Frank O’Hara and Robert Duncan at various downtown venues and broadcast Antonin Artaud’s radio piece ‘To Have Done with the Judgment of God’, complete with ‘gongs and blood-curdling screams’, to the whole of Bleecker Street. In 1965 di Prima founded ...”

“... and prone to self-destruction. Wieners himself remembered taking the ferry to Provincetown with Frank O’Hara: ‘We stood again below deck by the hectic Atlantic cutting at our feet, speaking of Hart Crane and the last words we would have in our mouths at that moment of surrender.’ His idol was Billie Holiday, who gives the name to one of his best short ...”

“... The moor near Saddleworth, just south of the M62, inevitably features the Moors murderers. Ian Brady is defined with characteristic justice as ‘pouting, imperious’, with a ‘facility for barbarism’. The land round Fylingdales is pocked with craters left by artillery exercises which are now rife with tadpoles and newts, while the moor supports fox ...”

“... what I recall a mite closer to the facts of the matter. Doris Lessing left behind two ex-husbands, Frank Wisdom and Gottfried Lessing, and the two young children of her marriage to Frank. Men do this all the time – desert the family, shall we say, in one form or another – but we assume, partly because of ...”

“... blackmail and sheer corruption. After 30 years Evans still burns with hatred at the name of ‘Reg Brady, a Communist “father of the chapel” in the pressroom’. He also admits that the paper’s management were well and truly outfought in this continual guerrilla warfare with the printers, sourly adding that Brady’s ...”