“... remarks. We see him carrying about a matchbox filled with moss; lying on his stomach under a bush to inhale the earth; able to tell when a work of his was on the airwaves and turning the radio on to prove it; and so responsive to colour that ‘a particular blue banknote always put him out of sorts.’ His absolute pitch was such that he could complain ...”

“... In contrast, the entirely voluntary resignations in 1958 of the Chancellor of the Exchequer, Peter Thorneycroft, and his two junior ministers, Nigel Birch and Enoch Powell, came down from above not ‘up from below’. The quarrel was a Cabinet one. In his resignation speech Thorneycroft claimed that he ‘alone in the Cabinet stood against ...”

“... bioethics commentary. In 1995, Clinton created a National Bioethics Advisory Commission, which Bush replaced with a President’s Council on Bioethics. Bioethics (or medical ethics) has been established in the UK for about as long as it has been in the US. The Journal of Medical Ethics was founded in 1975; ethics is now routinely taught in British medical ...”

“... is at constant risk from a bout of amnesia. In his recent book on the office of Prime Minister, Peter Hennessy tells the story of how Whitehall forgot how to declare war.* When officials thought it might be useful to know how to do it, just after the invasion of the Falkland Islands by Argentina in 1982, they found that the relevant file was missing. It ...”

“... she is accompanying the Italian president to London to meet Jack Straw and she also translated for Bush on his visit to Italy last year. The library at the British Council is busy and full of students who only leave when it closes at 8 p.m., and seeing these young Italians reading English books and magazines, watching videos and generally finding this a ...”

“... Trinity!10 January. In George Lyttelton’s Commonplace Book it’s recorded that Yeats told Peter Warlock that after being invited to hear ‘The Lake Isle of Innisfree’ (a solitary man’s expression of longing for still greater solitude) sung by a thousand Boy Scouts he set up a rigid censorship to prevent anything like that ever happening ...”

“... consequences have been obvious. Carter, Brzezinski and their successors in the Reagan and first Bush administrations, including Gates, Cheney, Rumsfeld, Rice, Wolfowitz, Armitage and Powell, all bear some responsibility for the 1.8 million Afghan casualties, 2.6 million refugees and 10 million unexploded land-mines that followed from their decisions. They ...”

“... a willy-wagtail, I thought, lifting up her feathers and singing, bless her. A bird in the hand, bush too, her eyes alight, her laughter everywhere’); and – perhaps Parrot’s most original creation – the strange genius Algernon Watkins, who forges banknotes day and night bent double in a priest hole in the depths of Piggott’s Elizabethan house. One ...”

“... where Modernism is concerned? During the 1980s, a generation of American scholars – Ron Bush, Reed Dasenbrock, Michael Groden, James Longenbach, Lawrence Rainey – set those limits by mapping in great detail the relations between the various literary Modernists and examining the genesis of their major writings. Mutual influence is by no means the ...”

“... life – emblematically, almost mythologically – sets out challenges faced by many writers. Peter Alexander’s biography, Les Murray: A Life in Progress (2000), is a volume every poet and aspiring poet should buy, filch or borrow. Having first met Murray in 1985, I filched it almost as soon as it was published (and draw on it here). The most arresting ...”

“... sheerness of marble, the egg-yellowness of chromate. The materials of the land artists – the bush, the tree, the moor from which the material has cropped up – retain their fibrousness or graininess, dirtiness or translucency, as nearly as can be in their natural state. This already typifies, even stereotypes, the land artists too much. They are not a ...”

“... crisis, Louis Barthou telephoned me to give me good news, that for a moment he left a thorny bush to offer me a little flower.’ Rearrange in five ...”

“... convenience: ‘restaurants, theatre tickets’. Larsen was born in Chicago in 1891. Her father, Peter Walker, was Black and came from the Danish West Indies; her mother, Marie, was a white Danish immigrant. Walker disappeared soon after Nella’s birth. Her mother then married a fellow Danish immigrant who never accepted his mixed-race stepdaughter. Nella ...”

“... distemper remains, despite the viral assaults of life in a genetically-modified George W. Bush fiefdom (fevers, sweats, steroid-regimens), genially satiric rather than venomous and bile-secreting; he targets the virtual reality spooks of Lit-Lite. The fawn jackets. The suit-bags. The shaved sentences. English fiction (the creative reading list), as he ...”

“... groundswell of criticism had begun. Country people, condescended to by the saying ‘Sydney or the bush’, resented money being spent in the capital, even though it was lottery money. Rival contractors hungered for the orders that were going to firms, like Ralph Symonds’s, favoured by Utzon. Australia’s foremost architect, Harry Seidler, himself an ...”