“... poet with atrophied tastes, he can expect a commission to do something tasteful on Glynn Williams. The Commander has become the ashy residue of Neo-Romanticism, out there in the Fens, a John Piper with backbone, silhouetted against lowering skies, fretting to escape the inconvenience of some vulgar stiff and get at those rough flint churches. Philip ...”

“... his imprint on the growing movement: Iolo Morganwg. He was born in Glamorgan and christened Edward Williams in 1747. The bardic name by which he is known was not a total invention, for Iolo is a short form of the Welsh form of Edward, Iorwerth, and Morganwg just indicated his native area – ‘Glamorgan Eddie’. He was a marginal member of the culture, for ...”

“... also explain why Fifa have brought in a new ball, just in time for the Fifa World Cup Germany. Paul Robinson shelled out £420 on new balls just before the tournament to get some early practice in, and reports that it swerves more than the familiar ball and will be harder for goalkeepers. That doesn’t mean it’s easier for outfield players, and ...”

“... recognition gave him courage and confidence. The following year, rejected by Yale, he decided on Williams. Once there, he scarcely attended classes, preferring to spend his time in the library. After a year, he moved back to New York, eventually taking a job in the Map Room of the New York Public Library. He begged his father to send him to Paris, and a few ...”

“... story of his singularity was repeated so often that in 2014 his biographers Martin Lee-Browne and Paul Guinery could still claim that ‘Delius would spend his life composing music that bore no relationship to anything, good or bad, that had been written before.’Delius has been perceived this way in part because he wrote music that was not easily associated ...”

“... crude rhetoric and subtle drama.’ Hardy’s extended discussions of the deaths of Nell and Paul Dombey are every bit as intelligent as Stewart’s, and designed to make a quite opposite point about troughs and peaks in Dickensian artistry. The terms ‘form’ and ‘feeling’ have been refrains in Hardy’s criticism for the last ten years. Her ...”

“... Keith and Mick. Like brothers. Like evil sisters in disguise. A two-headed beast. The opposite of Paul and John. The dark and the light. I’ve always been pulled toward darkness. Toward black. Toward death. Toward the South. Good. Now I’m heading the right direction. Away from the quaint North. Away from lobsters and white churches and Civil War graveyards ...”

“... Suddenly we are in Margaret Atwood’s Gilead.Drain may have become the Westboro Baptists’ St Paul – the convert who stiffens the creed and seizes control – but he is a ludicrous figure even by Westboro standards. You can watch him and one of the uncles on YouTube, being nimbly tormented by Russell Brand: two pudgy doofuses you’d think twice about ...”

“... what we might call their apparent ordinariness, and only occasionally, as with Jim Carrey or Robin Williams, does an actor come along who seems to have the superhuman plasticity of a cartoon. These movie actors, whatever else they happen to be, are works of animation: they can make their faces, and their emotions, do anything, and they live their on-screen ...”

“... and David have hitherto regarded as talentless, overrated, or simply wankers: Oasis, the Stones, Paul McCartney, John Lennon, Robbie Williams, Kingsley Amis, Martin Amis, Evelyn Waugh, Auberon Waugh, Salman Rushdie, Jeffrey Archer, Tony Blair, Gordon Brown, William Shakespeare (although to be fair they despise the comedies ...”

“... as if for this dionysian release that never came, I thought of the Salt Lake City scholar Paul Shepard’s claim that Yahweh was originally a Semitic storm god. I also felt for the first time something of the beseeching powerlessness of those who prayed to an angry, unpredictable God, and felt how easy it would be to identify that God with the ...”

“... you’re the one trying to hold it together or the one who’s trying to prise the sides apart.Paul Gilroy – one of Hall’s many illustrious former students – suspects it was frustration with New Labour, and what it did to left politics, that led Hall in the 1990s to spend more and more time working on ‘less depressing’ Black Arts projects ...”

“... Simpson said on Panorama. ‘It’s off the scale of everybody’s belief system,’ said the DJ Paul Gambaccini. But it is our belief system. And now it is part of the same system to blame Savile. He’s dead, anyway. Let’s blame him for all the things he obviously was, and blame him for a host of other things we don’t understand, such as how we love ...”

“... read this one by Mariani, a serial biographer of poets (he has notched already, among Americans, Williams, Crane, Lowell and Berryman), I don’t feel much the better for it. I got more, qua biography, from the bare bones of the 11-page chronology in the Library of America edition of Stevens; or from the brisk 15-page sketch called ‘Wallace Stevens: A ...”

“... a discourse on culture as if Adorno, Horkheimer and Benjamin, Kristeva, Barthes and Foucault, Williams, Eagleton and many others had never existed. My intellectual disagreements with Peter Fuller in the last years of his life turned on his espousal of this complacency, his attempt to give some theoretical and ethical substance to this Establishment ...”