“... he said he needed five thousand candidates to stand in next year’s local elections, the crowd rose to their feet. ‘This is the people’s army in operation,’ he grinned. I left as the national anthem started up. Outside the auditorium I met Nick Lockett, a barrister and Reform candidate for Westminster council. He was wearing a large turquoise rosette ...”

“... reads as follows:Then Jacob gave Esau bread and pottage of lentiles; and he did eat and drink, and rose up, and went his way: thus Esau despised his birthright.To illustrate the plight of industrial labour, Marx refashioned this biblical episode into a modern story of exploitation: like Esau, the modern worker sells his birthright for food. Fowkes recognises ...”

“... writing with every semblance of scruple about distant parts of the world. The Times correspondent, Peter Nichols, recently told his readers that El Salvador was a microcosm of Latin America, and he is the author of a book that lovingly details the varieties of the Italian peninsula. His The Pope’s Divisions scorns any such discrimination for the larger ...”

“... Sensitive Plant’ and ‘The Witch of Atlas’ Shelley ‘takes a common object such as a rose or a boat, and the more he describes it, the less we remember what it is.’ Or to refer, with Leavis, to Shelley’s ‘weak grasp upon the actual’. There is no merit in urging Shelley to buck up and look hard at a ...”

“... bookshop and publisher in North London, Johnson met the Trinidadian poet and activist John La Rose, who became his mentor. He was also introduced to Caribbean intellectuals including Brathwaite, Andrew Salkey and Sam Selvon.With Selvon’s encouragement, Johnson abandoned his attempts to write poetry in standard English and began experimenting with ...”

“... for a surrogate mother in every relationship,’ says Elizabeth Sweeting). His ‘marriage’ to Peter Pears, begun shortly after Mrs Britten’s death, may be partly understood in this light (Pears’s singing voice, it was noted, was uncannily similar to Mrs Britten’s), as may his lifelong willingness to be looked after, sometimes dominated, by a series ...”

“... according to the Bettelheim principle, but dies, leaving a flower behind her – St Joseph’s rose. Sendak would probably argue that children need to face the reality of death: but the confrontation is here made altogether queasy – and, yes, sentimental – by a miasma of piety. In spite of their veneration for the originating Volk, the Grimms ...”

“... tai and yu (‘essence’ and ‘attribute’) and the arrangement of loaded words (‘pine’, ‘rose’, ‘late cherry blossom’), renga poets such as Basho developed skills inseparable from compilation. What held between poems became intrinsic. The renga recently written by Paz, Roubaud, Sanguineti and Charles Tomlinson are thus suggestive. They explore ...”

“... the virtues of The Book History Reader is that it brings such continuities to light, pairing Mark Rose’s densely particularised history of copyright law with Foucault and Barthes on authorship, or Janice Radway’s lovingly detailed reconstruction of the Book-of-the-Month Club’s marketing strategies with Stanley Fish’s aggressively perverse model of ...”

“... like a cartoon wolf while motorbikes crash in her wake.What’s Up, Doc? was directed by Peter Bogdanovich, fresh from the success of The Last Picture Show. For the first time Streisand was in the hands of a director her own age and a denizen of New Hollywood. Bogdanovich, ever the auteur, had worked out every beat to his own exact specifications. In ...”

“... and Glasgow also enthral him. He is baffled by those like G.M. Trevelyan and, more recently, Peter Hall, who have found in the Victorian urban patchwork only muddle. Yet muddle there was, the reader is reminded, as idea locks horns with idea and style jostles with style. Take the marginal matter of style. The industrial cities were aware they amounted to ...”

“... Israel, the only English actor in a cast of Americans. He was sitting in the hotel bar as the sun rose, accompanied by some local cronies and a bottle of vodka. Panting into the bar came two members of the cast, jogging at dawn. ‘Hi,’ they said. ‘Are you up to do your exercises?’ ‘I’m doing them,’ he said, raising his glass to the ...”

“... The people’s game without the people,’ the football commentator Peter Drury said on 12 March, introducing BT Sport’s coverage of the Europa League fixture between Wolverhampton Wanderers and the Greek side Olympiacos. ‘It’s not the same for you and it’s not the same without you.’ The match was taking place behind closed doors, as all sporting events will be for the foreseeable future ...”

“... them difficult to spot from the air.This slow progress allowed my father, Territorial Army Captain Peter Raban of (to give his full address) ‘A’ Troop, 265 Battery, 67th Field Regiment, Royal Artillery, to spend much of 21 January putting the finishing touches to an unusually long and well-thought-out letter to my mother, which reads as if he put it ...”

“... became a schoolmaster in Kent, and his son became a headmaster in Essex, and his son, my father, Peter Bunting, fought with distinction, while only a very young man, in the Second World War, and after it was over went up to Brasenose College, Oxford – the first time a Bunting had been so elevated, and unfortunately the last, since I was a student only at ...”