“... time as Dr No (the movie). Reviews of the novel pointed out the contrast between the glamour of James Bond and the grime of Deighton’s spy world: there are no Aston Martins or high-rolling casinos in The Ipcress File, just ‘a little grey rusting Morris 1000’ and a grimy strip-joint on Wardour Street. The class difference between the protagonists is ...”

“... they knew that it was modern.’ The modernists certainly took to her; she was published alongside James Joyce, positively reviewed by H.D. and praised as being ‘above praise’ by Marianne Moore. ‘If we choose to leave the poems of Charlotte Mew out of our literary heritage,’ ...”

“... behest, delivered a parcel containing a pair of old brown shoes to a distinctly unappreciative James Joyce. The shoes apart, Eliot was having a good time. He considered Lewis the most profitable person he had had to talk to for a long time. In Saumur, Lewis fell off his bicycle, and was soon looking for someone to sue. When, appeased by a row with the ...”

“... the will, as Chesterton pointed out, means nothing if not the willingness to give things up. Tom Moore sang for his supper until there was nothing left of him, but it was not the fault of Holland House, which could be walked away from, as Byron proved. There is a crushing sort of determinism which tries to make social élites responsible for the corruption ...”

“... assure the collapse of the Trump administration in the near future. The firing of the FBI director James Comey was the event that brought suspicions to a pitch that will be hard to maintain, and equally hard to scale down. Much of the provocation came from the multiple explanations offered by Trump. Comey was fired, he said at first, because of his mishandling ...”

“... the most significant phase of Orientalist scholarship were over. In 1813, Byron had advised Thomas Moore: ‘Stick to the East … it [is] the only poetical policy.’ The ‘policy’ had impelled Byron, Southey and Moore to write about the gul-e-bulbul (the stock Persian metaphor for the nightingale in the garden), and ...”

“... in this public spot, from rocks that are now buried under the reclaimed land that is Sean Moore Park. After which: ‘He laid the dry snot picked from his nostril on a ledge of rock, carefully. For the rest let look who will.’Later in the day, as the sunset glows over these same rocks, Gerty MacDowell sits in a cosy nook beside the ‘sparkling ...”

“... disentangle. To say that his big pictures – the Death of Nelson, Coriolanus, even the Death of James Dean – look like enlarged illustrations is unfair to his real illustrations. He was delighted when he found he could use a big photograph of a drawing on an exhibition stand, and was right to be. His pen marks were much more interesting than his brush ...”

“... worth living. By talking about well-being, he believes he has halted the infinite regress of G.E. Moore’s claim that ‘goodness could not be equated with any property of human experience (e.g. pleasure, happiness, evolutionary fitness) because it would always be appropriate to ask whether the property on offer was itself good.’ (It’s not incidental ...”

“... Here, he makes a genuine contribution. Looming over Rakove’s account is the figure of James Madison, the diminutive, colourless Virginian who, although never accorded the place in popular memory enjoyed by his contemporaries, George Washington and Thomas Jefferson, fathered the Constitution and offered the most compelling rationale for ...”

“... I write something, anything, good, indifferent, or trashy, every day,’ he told his friend James Stern, ‘I feel ill.’ Spurred on by these complementary inducements – the need to make money and the need not to be sick – he wrote quantities of prose. It appeared, over the years, in an impressive range of journals, from Eliot’s Criterion and ...”

“... has all the books, it’s hard to be specific (a Collected Poems as soon as possible, please).’ James MacGibbon’s edition followed in 1975, but it has now been out of print for twenty years. Seamus Heaney reviewed it appreciatively but apologetically: ‘Yet finally the voice, the style, the literary resources are not adequate to the sombre ...”

“... campaign that led to the introduction of Section 28. (Thatcher’s authorised biographer, Charles Moore, suggested that her motive was her hatred of local government education policies, as if a legislative exercise in queer-bashing, which blighted the lives of gay children for a generation, were somehow excusable as a means to a worthy end.) In this ...”

“... and capricious’; New York, a ‘restless monster of possibility and liability’; Marianne Moore gave us ‘treasures of eccentricity and authenticity’. It’s an aural trick: if one thing sounds like another, their pairing seems right.Hardwick once admitted that she would read her work and ‘look for a line where I might insert a vivid phrase, or ...”

“... tropics, the search for a different earthly orientation or accommodation)? Maybe Browning or Henry James – the Master and onlie begetter, I am increasingly coming to think, of all the great modernist poets, of Pound and Eliot and Moore and Stevens?Most readers of the poems will have a pretty accurate sense of the ...”