“... in Dallas ran a conference in November. Nor is More much celebrated outside academia and St Peter’s. The fate of the Romanov obelisk in Moscow’s Alexander Garden, first put up in 1914 to mark the tercentenary of the dynasty, is illustrative. Bolsheviks re-engraved the obelisk with More’s name and other mooted harbingers of communism. In 2013, 99 ...”

“... neighbour at Euston. Urban planning utopias have never been popular except with political elites. Peter Willmott and Michael Young, in Family and Kinship in East London (1957), painted a dire picture of community warmth in the old East End giving way to anomie and alienation in the new towns to which bombed-out families were forced to move. In the end, the ...”

“... the fearful conflicts of interest which surround our ecological predicament. Another such book was Peter Singer’s Animal Liberation. Singer, like Passmore, devoted much of his time to clearing the ground – marshalling the relevant facts, surveying the range of existing attitudes, pointing out their confusions, and tracing the sources of trouble in the ...”

“... Row suits, could easily be a real-life counterpart of Dorothy L. Sayers’s fictional sleuth Lord Peter Wimsey. (It’s a nice touch that the affair gets a mention in her 1935 detective novel Gaudy Night. Wimsey himself had clearly been following it keenly.) The dishevelled, corduroy-clad communist Pollard has more than a whiff of Le Carré about him: in one ...”

“... in spite of the Freedom of Information Act.During the Napoleonic Wars, newspapers were allowed to read and reprint naval and military dispatches in return for carrying ‘paragraphs agreeable to the Ministry’. Today, as Norton-Taylor reminds us, Whitehall departments still run their own gentlemanly lobbies in which selected hacks are allowed to see ...”

“... with ways of making sense of the world around me.’ There were other formative influences. He read widely, and quickly absorbed the work of Léopold Senghor, Langston Hughes, Gwendolyn Brooks and Amiri Baraka, whose poetry drew on vernacular speech patterns and the rhythms of jazz and blues. Through New Beacon Books, a radical bookshop and publisher in ...”

“... is at his frequent best, however, when his poetry is least negotiable in the hands of people who read it on the look-out for what they hope to find there. He knew himself to be a great poet, a man privileged to receive the awesome and often close to terrifying visitations of genius. It is about the gestations of that poetry that he most often writes, as if ...”

“... indexed four different ways and its narrative is laid out year-by-year, which makes for a dullish read from cover to cover but will mean that anyone wanting quick reliable information can dip into it easily. The Chronicler of Barsetshire will serve, if nothing else, as the essential reference book. Super excels in marshalling facts clearly and accurately. But ...”

“... or closed-ness, the drama has drifted away. Ginsberg says that his Collected Poems ‘may be read as a lifelong poem including history, wherein things are symbols of themselves’. But this is disingenuous. He is a very literary poet, even if a line in ‘What would you do if you lost it?’ says: ‘Campion, Creeley, Anacreon, Blake I never ...”

“... points of kinship with Europe. Vietnam, Korea, Japan were all nations long before they learned to read Western books; so was China, even though its unwieldy bulk left the national idea more amorphous. In Vietnam a national consciousness. Hodgkin writes, ‘was certainly emerging during the early medieval period’, or the tenth to 15th centuries, with roots ...”

“... is your subject speaking’ is vivid and painful to such a degree that it’s hard to read the poem without crying. It also provides a useful landmark in immediately contemporary verse, for several reasons, of which its reverence for Larkin is only one. Like a short story, it moves elliptically through a series of pictorial scenes, mostly ...”

“... was an undergraduate, of a scholarly edition of John Locke’s Two Treatises of Government by Peter Laslett. Laslett showed how radically Locke’s text had been misunderstood because of the ignorance of political scientists about, and their indifference to, the circumstances and aims of its composition. Locke’s second Treatise, it emerged, was written ...”

“... the family the photograph and place it on the mantelpiece. That was the summer, I recall, when I read Crime and Punishment, while fishing the Pound Lough with Patrice, my French exchange partner, who pored over thick volumes of Balzac to be ready for school in September. I spend the evening – or part of it – with Himself Alone, and then we all head out ...”

“... ill) of the Beats; Williams the comical minimalist, who proved that a note on the fridge could be read as a poem; Williams the Modernist, a foil for experimental painters, or for his difficult friend Ezra Pound. More recently, we have had Williams the avant-garde sentinel, dislocating sense and meaning in the manner of Gertrude Stein, and Williams the ...”

“... imaginary woodlands, developing and expanding material from earlier lectures and essays. As Peter Holland’s eloquent afterword reminds us, Barton’s interest in the topic had first been excited by her reading of Ben Jonson’s Robin Hood play, The Sad Shepherd, for her monograph on Shakespeare’s great rival. Given this history, it may seem ...”