“... vibe. Both ring true. Among H.D.’s most significant attendants in her later life was Norman Holmes Pearson, later a professor at Yale, but during the war an agent of the OSS and head of counterintelligence in London. Pearson urged her to revisit various works written and set aside in the 1920s, serving as her de facto agent in the US, and ...”

“... increase its underground following. It was Ginsberg’s old Columbia colleagues, John Hollander, Norman Podhoretz and Louis Simpson, all cutting their teeth in the New York literary scene under the approving auspices of Lionel and Diana Trilling, who led the charge against the Beats. ‘It is only fair to Allen Ginsberg to remark on the utter lack of decorum ...”

“... appropriate for royalty. Left to her own devices she liked a prawn cocktail, convinced that Marie Rose sauce was a ‘far more exotic mix’ than ketchup and mayonnaise.Over the decades the princess and her lady in waiting became an effective double act. They made a striking couple: at nearly six foot tall, Glenconner towered over Margaret’s ...”

“... harp that once through Tara’s halls’, ‘The Minstrel Boy’ and especially ‘The last rose of summer’. These songs were performed in concerts, and in the polite parlours and drawing rooms where Moore thought they belonged. ‘The Meeting of the Waters’ no doubt owed much of its popularity to the traditional air ‘The Old Head of Dennis’, to ...”

“... around some central feature, as with his restoration of Maddocks’s Town Hall at Tremadoc or his Rose Corner cottages dominating the crossroads at Bolesworth. By now he was involved in his ‘amenity brigade’, in those DIA Guides and admonitions, coupling conservation of past architectures with the creation of small, exemplary new communities, but in no ...”

“... essay ‘The Intellectual and Jewish Fate’, published in the Jewish magazine Commentary in 1957, Norman Podhoretz, the patron saint of neoconservative Zionists in the 1980s, said nothing at all about the Holocaust.Jewish organisations that became notorious for policing opinion about Zionism at first discouraged the memorialisation of Europe’s Jewish ...”

“... to return favours … which could make her seem cold and ungrateful’. Carruth’s wife, Rose Marie, remembered the meadow where Conrad killed himself as the site of an infamous picnic, where an increasingly abrasive Rich announced that ‘she planned to give away her pots and pans’ and ‘do a lot less cooking’.After Conrad’s death, Rich ...”

“... eras and whose beautiful latticework towers, which made such an impression on the likes of Norman Foster, were adopted as masts in the design of American battleships.Cohen also discusses the pre-Soviet affinity between America and Russia. One of the origin stories of modernist architecture concerns the monumental, apparently abstract concrete grain ...”

“... My only country​ /is six feet high,’ Norman MacCaig wrote in 1973; ‘and whether I love it or not/I’ll die/for its independence.’ This sort of muscular individualism, teetering on the edge of satire, is now unfashionable in MacCaig’s country. Scotland styles itself instead as a place of co-operation and the commonweal ...”

“... moving in front of me. Then I did, and the shock was like stepping on an adder. A clump of heather rose up and stood full height, revealing the figure of a grinning, camouflaged soldier. A platoon of Gurkhas emerged from veils of blaeberry and moss, rifles downwards, to share in the joke. For me, it was an education in the proximate power of the ...”

“... in the feminist fight club classic Town Bloody Hall (1979), where, from the audience, she takes Norman Mailer to task for his patronising use of the term ‘lady’ as a prefix – lady writer, lady critic. Even when issuing a rebuke (‘It feels like gallantry to you, but it doesn’t feel right to us’), Sontag keeps her cool in a raucous setting where ...”

“... observed by satellites, have shrunk by 10 per cent since the late 1960s; the average sea level rose between 0.1 and 0.2 metres during the 20th century (as a result of a combination of the thermal expansion of the warmer oceans and the increased run-off of melt-water). The atmospheric concentration of co2 has increased by 31 per cent since 1750; the present ...”

“... by the map, and yet we seemed permanently lost. One late afternoon we would enter a pretty Norman village, with its apple trees and broad barns, and two days later we re-entered it from the other end, and it was another place. The timber frames were still smouldering, and there were piles of old women’s clothes in the lanes, and the dead cattle were ...”

“... to enlist our complicity with the villain: from Dr Mabuse to the femme fatale in film noir to Norman Bates, it is typically the villain who drives the story forward. The young man’s wink merely makes this explicit. Later on, when the wife manages to get hold of a gun and shoots the chubby young man, the slim one regains control by using a remote control ...”

“... under his sack of boundary stones. They didn’t mutter curses as they fastened their wings And rose in widening farewell circles. They grieved for the garden growing smaller below them, Soon to exist only as a story That every day grows harder to believe. Carl Dennis, ‘Loss’ ‘Multitude’ is defined in Webster’s as ‘the state of being ...”