“... paper. In the evening, there would be the TV news, from NBC, ABC, CBS, the BBC or ITN, which you’d watch once, at a regular hour (even as late as 1997, CNN and Sky News were quite niche; Fox News had just started up, and the BBC’s 24-hour news channel launched that autumn). After the network news, there would be the local TV bulletin. Some evenings, there ...”

“... he says, ‘is all about this.’ He taps his forehead with his finger. England will do more for his mental attitude than Serbia or Greece, and 2012 is Britain’s Olympic year: sports psychologists will be queuing to receive him. All that remains is to slip across the Channel.Hundreds of thousands attempt to enter Europe without permission every ...”

“... and in the late summer of 1884 he decided he wouldn’t return to the South of France, where he’d spent the past year and a half in a house called La Solitude. His wife, Fanny, sought the advice of his London doctors, who recommended Davos in the Swiss mountains as being cholera-free, but Stevenson fancied southern England. Fanny’s son, Lloyd ...”

“... heartbreaking, humiliating, a total pain: but what else actually is there? What else can any of us do instead?‘The end of history’ was enormous when Rose was writing in the early 1990s, with Western liberal democracy triumphant and all the big geopolitical matters supposedly settled. As was ‘the end of philosophy’, as poststructuralism exposed the ...”

“... all of them, often in anticipation of delicate domestic negotiations. (‘Sorry, could you do the school run tomorrow? I’ll be knackered: it’s DR Congo v. Uzbekistan at 12.30 a.m., which could well be decisive.’) It is a global soap opera with a cast of geographically varying heroes and villains and ...”

“... he later became – a ‘Life’, the subject of your first full-length biography. You did and do admire him greatly as a poet, yet in his poetic practice didn’t he trample all over the distinctions, the reticences and borderlines, you set so much store by in your own verse?Yes. I suppose that is where the whole idea of confessional poetry came ...”