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“... simplicity itself as a disguise. What the wind blows away The wind blows back again is how Norman Nicholson ends a poem in his new collection, Sea to the West. The lines are perhaps low on witty morality, but their power is the greater for that: coming at the end of a description of weather over Black Combe (a recurrent point de repère of the ...”

“... But if we look for Wordsworth as a live presence in the poetry of this century, we come up with Norman Nicholson and Basil Bunting, and who else? In a tight spot Wall-ace Stevens appealed to the famous line from ‘Michael’, ‘And never lifted up a single stone’ (drawing from it unwarrantable inferences, as Robinson points out): but Stevens’s ...”

“... post a statement to the nation’. So, too, the closing image of ‘Inventions’, an elegy for Norman Nicholson, refers to June grass as ‘yellowish’: ‘that shade old Faber covers/fade to, when a book was a real book’. That last phrase works like ‘fancy name’: ‘real’ looks crudely reactionary at first, but in the context of grass and ...”

“... lingered stubbornly within Protestant artisan culture. Recalling his 1920s Cumbrian childhood, Norman Nicholson, a tailor’s son and a Methodist, put it more eloquently than most: We all belonged to the same country. And that country was the Holy Land. The landscape of the Bible was far more familiar to us than the geography of England. We had news ...”

“... of and notes on Dante. He also had an influence on Sidney Keyes, Vernon Watkins, Anne Ridler and Norman Nicholson, and on the undergraduate Philip Larkin, who admired his lecturer’s novels. Victor Gollancz and L.H. Myers, both given to occult speculations, were fans of the thrillers; Dylan Thomas attended his lectures. There was a harried quality ...”

“... of things-as-they-are in work by artists as different as Constable, Lord Leighton and William Nicholson – all of it showing painters enjoying the tools of their trade. Menzel was modern in the sense that the notes he made on the world as he saw it do not pass through the prism of style. Degas admired him as he admired Charles Keene, and one would guess ...”

“... stuff on the public record. Let’s take the spirit of J. Michael Lennon’s ‘double life’ of Norman Mailer and offer that doubleness back as subjective criticism. Mailer, after all, gave us the non-fiction novel, Lennon gives us the pseudo-objective biography, so why can’t I offer the confessional review? On the afternoon of 10 April 2007 I was on a ...”

“... than ignoring, say, Matisse from among many other foreign contenders for their attention. With Norman Reid, who became director in 1964, priorities were decisively reversed. The transitional figure is John Rothenstein, director from 1938 to 1964. Spalding does full justice to his complex personality and mixed achievement. The thrilling episode when he ...”

“... on the gossamer constructions of current art theory? You get ringing in your ears when you read Norman Bryson, and fear you have caught Ménière’s disease off the page? Do not despair. There is a remedy. The second posthumous volume of Edgar Wind’s essays outdoes even its sumptuous predecessor in intellectual glitter and academic burnishing. Only 120 ...”

“... the free-market excesses that were to follow. Punk auditioned the dark night of Keith Joseph and Norman Tebbit. It turns out that none of the punk parasites much liked the sounds or the bands who produced them. They were career anarchists, varnishing their leather armour while they waited for an offer from the Daily Mail. Essentially, NME ‘new ...”

“... life was other than a negative-positive mosquito buzzing in the ear of a total vacuum.’ Where Norman Mailer set out to bend the future with his telepathic powers and the Beats sought to hot-wire the American psyche (at the risk of frying their own circuits), Updike wrote as if he were doing fine draftsmanship under a cone of light, honouring creation and ...”

“... on a particular language – varieties of Gaelic, of course, but also Latin writing in Ireland and Norman-French texts; and there are sections devoted to major authors such as Yeats and Joyce and to major historical events such as the Famine. Each section begins with a substantial critical introduction by the responsible contributing editor and ends with brief ...”

“... is a study of envy and egomania that happens to play itself out in the world of publishing. Nicholson Baker in U and I probed the devastating realisation that Updike ‘writes better than I do and is smarter than I am’. Here, though, there is no sense of one writer warding off another’s potentially crushing influence, or of the fragile ...”

“... Heald(Now)Thomas Hinde(Sunday Telegraph)Bernard Levin(Sunday Times)Blake Morrison(TLS)John Nicholson(Times)Richard Rayner(Time Out)Anthony Thwaite(Observer)MiddlingPaul Ableman(Spectator)Peter Conrad(Harpers & Queen)Alan Hollinghurst(New Statesman)Christopher Wordsworth(Guardian)UnfavourablePaul Ableman(Spectator)Robert Cottrell(Financial Times)Martyn ...”

“... Princess Margaret met Lucian Freud and Ian Fleming; Tennant’s previous girlfriend, Ivy Nicholson, became part of Andy Warhol’s Factory, and Jeanne Campbell, the daughter of the 11th duke of Argyll, went on to have an affair with Fidel Castro. Anne and Colin got engaged. Her father was annoyed because he wanted her to marry one of his old comrades ...”