“... the crude evolutionary psychology that has become popular in recent years: that of Leda Cosmides, John Tooby, Steven Pinker and their acolytes, who argue that we still have biologically fixed Stone Age minds constituted by mental models evolved to solve problems of Pleistocene environments, principally those of the African savanna of three million years ...”

“... founded the Poets Press, which would go on to publish around thirty books, including titles by Clive Matson, Michael McClure and John Ashbery as well as Audre Lorde’s collection The First Cities.Despite her centrality to the community of artists and writers on the Lower East Side, di Prima’s work was never afforded ...”

“... by tipsy reindeer – may be a tortuous folk-memory of this cult. According to the philologist John Allegro, if I remember his drift correctly, Jesus Christ was also a mushroom. More recently, the witches of Medieval Europe used such homely drugs as belladonna, henbane and mandrake, both in their role as crypto-medical ‘wise-women’ – the atrophine in ...”

“... for me to draw three eggs than write “three eggs”’ – but then, thanks to the journalist Clive Irving, who enjoyed eating at his house, Deighton’s ‘cookstrips’ began to appear in the Daily Express in 1960 and soon moved to the Observer. They were collected in the mid-1960s as Len Deighton’s Action Cook Book and Où est le garlic? French ...”

“... with wide success. Birmingham, with its Political Union, was one of the more promising localities. Clive Behagg rejects the long-accepted account of concord being favoured by a small-unit industrial structure: big business took a prominent hand in the Union. This may of course make it less surprising that collaboration did not go further; at any rate, it was ...”

“... for instance, Burns Singer, one of the most original poets of the Fifties, or David Wright and John Heath-Stubbs. All three were friends of Graham, and their inclusion might have helped the Forties and Fifties out of their New Apocalypse v. Movement stand-off. Hamish Henderson, whose 1948 Elegies for the Dead in Cyrenaica (reprinted by Polygon in ...”

“... the so-called winter of discontent. Still, it was a much better piece than was generally allowed (Clive James and Richard Ingrams making particular fools of themselves) but it wasn’t what viewers had come to expect from me and so was unfamiliar, or too unfamiliar anyway, a little unfamiliarity often an ingredient of success at any rate with critics, as it ...”

“... he does not call these pieces poems.’ From the heart of the London literary establishment Sir John Squire described The Waste Land as a poem for which ‘a grunt would serve equally well.’ Eliot’s 1925 collection, which included ‘Gerontion’, seemed to Squire ‘obscure so inconsequent . . . Why on earth he bothers to write at all is difficult to ...”

“... and drop unhurt. I saw it done myself but by a man of rather athletic build.’Joyce’s friend John Francis Byrne, on whom he based the character of Cranly in A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man, lived at 7 Eccles Street from 1908 to 1910. ‘In 1909, when Joyce was visiting Dublin,’ we are told on page 1144 of the new volume of annotations to ...”

“... International handed detectives emails between Coulson and the News of the World’s royal editor, Clive Goodman, proposing paying the police officers who guarded the queen. Quietly, Scotland Yard joined Operation Elveden up with Operation Weeting, the phone hacking investigation, and Operation Tuleta, an investigation into the hacking of ...”

“... heroes outwit von Stumm and Hilda von Einem as they did in Greenmantle. Giles Railton, the hero of John Gardner’s novel, is a scion of the landed gentry and works in the mysterious upper reaches of the Foreign Office. There he recruits his offspring and nephews and nieces into the ranks of the secret service, just in time for the First World War. But all ...”

“... lack biographies in depth of key religious figure such as Stephen Marshall, Cornelius Burges, John Goodwin, Edmund Calamy, Henry Burton and others. They flit tantalisingly through the pages of Valerie Pearl’s valuable study of the London revolution of 1641, or Anthony Fletcher’s equally important analysis of petitioning on the eve of Civil War. It is ...”

“... the way he treated them. They all complain about the difficulty or impossibility of getting paid. Clive Barker spells out the most maddening part of it: In the mid-1960s Robert would say to me, ‘I’ll give you that money when I see you.’ But he didn’t realise I needed it that day, to live on. He didn’t understand. It was inconceivable to him that I ...”

“... of his rage at intrusions into his privacy, and one remembers him forcing the withdrawal of John Peter’s article from Essays in Criticism because it suggested a homosexual element in his relationship with Jean Verdenal. Lyndall Gordon reports a conversation with Mary Trevelyan which makes him seem mildly amused about this imputation, but his first ...”

“... chief priorities of Corbyn’s Labour Party were neatly captured in two speeches made by John McDonnell, his shadow chancellor and often the project’s most eloquent spokesman. In 2016 he declared that Labour members would ‘no longer have to whisper’ the word ‘socialism’: the party would no longer be ashamed of its values. And in the dying ...”