“... just been a nuisance to him. However, in 1932, he got to know the young, beautiful and dotty Robert Heber Percy, otherwise known as ‘the Mad Boy’, for whom he fell and who became a fixture in his household, eventually inheriting Berners’s estate. ‘No one,’ Mark Amory writes, ‘could liberate Berners himself at this stage, but Heber Percy ...”

“... Two years later, aged 23, Frankenthaler painted Mountains and Sea (1952), its watery veils of green, blue, pink, ochre and grey spread irregularly across the surface in unusual shapes. This was the first work in her new style and it was produced by a new technique. She poured oil paint diluted with turpentine directly onto unprimed canvas laid on the ...”

“... the pass:And today a girl walks in home to usCarrying a basket full of new potatoes,Three tight green cabbages, and carrotsWith the tops and mould still fresh on them.Such an ending, in its tender hope, looks cynicism’s desperation levelly in the eye. The gait with which the line itself ‘walks in home to us’ is simply sturdy. There are no ...”

“... have no idea what that means.’ Uprootedness is one of his major interests. In ‘Beginning to Green’, from The Wrecking Light (2010), he wrote: ‘I find a kind of hope here, in this/homelessness, in this place/where no one knows me.’ That sense of deracination connects Robertson’s earlier work to his latest, The Long Take, or a Way to Lose More ...”

“... have aliens in and carry endorsements from China Miéville; others are alien-free and endorsed by Robert Macfarlane. He has fans who’ve read all the science fiction but not Climbers (1989), his semi-autobiographical masterpiece about rock climbing in the North of England, and fans who are effusive about Climbers but won’t go near the sci-fi. It’s not ...”

“... dark, from a Hackney-coach’. Motte fretted about several details, including the blue, red and green ribbons for which Lilliputian ministers compete by dancing on ropes. In the published text, he changed the colours to purple, yellow and white; blue, red and green were the colours, respectively, of the Orders of the ...”

“... a name exotic or absurd, half old-time Jewish and half Hollywood – Shenandoah Fish, Hershey Green, Cornelius Schmidt. In his best verse play, Shenandoah, he even features himself looking back on his own naming ceremony twenty-five years earlier. When his mother, Elsie Fish, decides on Shenandoah, he breaks out Macbeth-like: Now it is done and quickly ...”

“... Writing letters was not the work Robert Lowell thought himself born to do, but what with one thing and another – good friends, a lively mind, deep troubles – he wrote a great many of them, demonstrating at considerable length ‘the excitement of his intelligence and the liveliness of his prose’. These are the words of Saskia Hamilton, the poet who has undertaken the arduous and complicated task of editing this selection ...”

“... Odysseus’ behaviour the night before he slaughters his wife Penelope’s suitors, which Peter Green translates like this: As a man cooking a paunch chockful of fat and blood on a fierce blazing fire will turn it to and fro, determined to get it cooked through as fast as he can, so Odysseus tossed this way and that, trying to work out how he was going to ...”

“... Robert Moses​ was a modernist pharaoh. Over the forty years from the early 1930s to the late 1960s, he became a virtual dictator of public works in all five boroughs of New York and much of its suburban surroundings. Almost singlehandedly, through chicanery, fraud and bullying, he created the modern infrastructure of the New York City area: expressways, tunnels and bridges, but also parks, beaches, swimming pools and high-rise housing projects ...”

“... in the American non-objective field’. Yet Diebenkorn, who expressed a deep admiration for Robert Motherwell and de Kooning, was clearly cautious about going the whole hog. Disintegrating Pig takes us through the motions of abstract painting but it’s more a rehearsal of abstraction than the thing itself and it’s difficult not to see the ...”

“... these are read over a background of watercolour in rectangles which pale from a dark green border to a cream centre. In these drawings, and others in which perspectives of box-like structures run off into the distance, transparent watercolour builds up overlapping areas, wash by wash. When overlaps are made on a rectangular grid, patterns like ...”

“... Given​ how many of those who worked closely with Robert Maxwell wrote a book about him, it’s interesting that so many facts about him remain unclear. Did he face a death sentence at the age of sixteen? Was he in the French Foreign Legion? In the months before his death, in 1991, was he really being investigated for a war crime? Did MI6 finance his first business in order to recruit Soviet scientists? Was he a KGB asset? Did he have a financial relationship with Jeffrey Epstein? ‘He has done more for Israel than can be said here today,’ Yitzhak Shamir said at his funeral ...”

“... the celebrated ‘Lessons of the War’, both at once. I first met him in 1965, in the office of Robert Heilman, then the benevolent but firm head of the English Department at the University of Washington in Seattle. Calling to present my credentials, I walked into a row; Heilman benevolently firm, Reed furious, licensed to be furious. He was in Seattle as a ...”

“... friend Matthew, who has actually had a first bout of DTs, seeing on his bedside table ‘a large green insect, about the size of a dictionary, staring at him with cobbled eyes and slowly-champing jaws’. Conscientiously the two men stock up with a crystal ball, dowsing-rods, a planchette and other mystagogical gear. As a matter of general policy they try to ...”