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“... You wanted us to be more British than the British!’Leroy comes top of his trainee class, quoting Robert Peel’s philosophy of policing to his teachers. His superiors ask him to be the face of a recruitment campaign. But when he is dispatched to his own North London neighbourhood he is forced to confront the reality of his institutional role. On his first ...”

“... Robert F. Kennedy Jr​ was nine years old on 22 November 1963 when his mother told him that ‘a bad man shot Uncle Jack.’ He was fourteen, asleep at boarding school, when his father was assassinated at a hotel in Los Angeles. He became used to the sound of people weeping everywhere he went, no matter what he did ...”

“... of a town? Can you dedicate a book to a dot – two dots – on the map? The poet and academic Robert Crawford has a soft spot for nice spots and he dedicated his 1990 collection, A Scottish Assembly, ‘to Scotland’. Some countries and some cities – like some people – openly insist on being loved, and some of them behave as underdogs, which only ...”

“... this spirit that Mrs Wood encouraged the courtship between her daughter and the aspirant curate, Frank Besant. The marriage, which took place in 1867, was a disaster from the rude shock of the first night. Frank was ‘serious’, a code-name for Low Church Evangelical; he was also politically conventional and narrowly ...”

“... St in 1950, the year before Schuyler’s breakdown, Schuyler met John Ashbery, Kenneth Koch and Frank O’Hara, who had been friends at Harvard. The ‘Harvard wits’, he called them. Schuyler had attended Bethany College, a small college in West Virginia affiliated with the Disciples of Christ, where he had devoted himself to bridge and then flunked ...”

“... in 1943, when Ashbery was 15, Margaret Hubbell Wells, a neighbour and family friend, wrote to Frank Boyden, the headmaster of Deerfield Academy in Massachusetts, a legendary figure in 20th-century American secondary education. Wells’s two older sons had attended Deerfield and she had been impressed by Ashbery’s bravura showing on Quiz Kids: Do you ...”

“... Homeresque epithets (every attractive woman is a ‘hardbody’ with ‘big tits’); sudden frank (and probably fake) declarations of emotion. Of course, the book also contains scenes of unparalleled repulsiveness: multiple rape-murders, dismemberments, disembowelments and the like. That several small logical impossibilities, scattered ...”

“... I haven’heard. He is Daron Aric Hagen, and Shining Brow is an opera about the early life of Frank Lloyd Wright, commissioned by Madison Opera, Wisconsin, Wright’s home state. The work was premièred there in April, but not having heard it, I cannot speak for the opera’s music. That, though, would not appear to be much of a drawback. Muldoon’s text ...”

“... turn out to be true after all. This makes absolute nonsense of Jane’s relationship with Frank Churchill: the upright, pure-hearted, melancholy Jane is represented as choosing to enter into a clandestine engagement with a man she does not really love, and (even more ludicrously) is endowed with a romantic yearning for Mr Knightley worthy of Harriet ...”

“... like the word “dissociate”’, the vice president, Hubert Humphrey, and the defence secretary, Robert McNamara, confirmed that ‘the prime minister’s position was well understood’ and ‘there would be no hard feelings.’ As the war in Vietnam progressed, however, opposition among the public and inside the Labour Party increased, and by late 1967 ...”

“... In April​ 1970, Robert Lowell and Elizabeth Hardwick – both aged 53, married for 21 years – had just been on holiday together in Italy with their 13-year-old daughter, Harriet. Hardwick and Harriet had come home to New York, where Hardwick taught at Barnard College; Lowell had gone to Oxford to take up a fellowship at All Souls ...”

“... background, and although Herbert Howarth wrote well about it in Some Figures behind T.S. Eliot, Robert Crawford has made a substantial addition. His patient Oxford D.Phil. thesis is intended more generally to illustrate Eliot’s preoccupation with the primitive and the city, but its opening chapters are about St Louis and the Mississippi. He illustrates ...”

“... Frank Kermode’s review of the new Gissing biography (page 9) brings to mind a project which I have long thought someone ought to tackle: a fearless update of New Grub Street. The job wouldn’t be too taxing – indeed, in many cases, it would be all too easy to attach contemporary names to Gissing’s sunken literary types: his principled dullards as well as his sleek chancers ...”

“... that could have reduced the casualty rate among air crews. This chapter is followed by one about Frank Thompson, whom he knew at Winchester, and who was executed in Bulgaria for fighting with the anti-Nazi resistance. The portrait of Thompson belongs here because it is part of the war, but perhaps also as a contrast with Dyson’s own wartime record, with ...”

“... whom he greatly admired. (For example, seeking a stanza form suitable for his elegy on Robert Gregory, he silently adopted that used by Cowley three hundred years earlier in his verses on the death of William Harvey.) On the whole it was probably just as well that Trinity, the Ascendancy college, was barred to him. He often complained of the ...”