“... with an escort of men in black leather jackets came over to give him a kiss. ‘Know who that was? Edward Shevardnadze’s granddaughter. She’s in TV news. And you know who directed that fantastic shot – the look on Shevy’s face as Misha Saakashvili burst into the parliament chamber with the crowd: the disbelief, the fear, the sag? She did. Her own ...”

“... of readers and of criticism. He needs to be read, but read on his own terms. Shakespeare said in the Sonnets: ‘Noe, I am that I am.’The Sonnets are in themselves a monument to that struggle, a battle both lost and won. The attempt to make Shakespeare a ‘company keeper’ even conditioned their first appearance. In 1609, late in the ...”

“... help of an unlikely Ariadne whose name on the ballot for President of the USA in 1980 was Senator Edward Kennedy. When Kennedy blandly welcomed the Poet at the airport in Naxos or Nassau, all he said was ‘Hello! Goodbye! I must be going!’ – and he then disappeared. The Poet was now on his own, with the dangerous ...”

“... Neil, her only brother, can’t believe ‘they would have told the family that.’ Newton was said to be artistic: two dusty little green-grey daubs – both of them Derbyshire landscapes – are among his surviving effects. There are two photographs of him in uniform – one from the beginning of the war, the other from the end. In the first he looks ...”

“... company boardroom.‘They didn’t know the mentality of the Somerdale workers,’ Amoree Radford said. ‘They would have worked to the death for the factory, but the directors didn’t know that.’ She’d worked there for ten years and her daughter Jade and husband Les still had jobs there when the news came. Dave Silsbury, a Unite official at the ...”

“... forms, and through which literature could play a moral role in a time of crisis.’ This is well said and could apply to another poem which I also want to place in alignment with ‘Venus will now say a few words’ in order to search out what remains ultimately unsatisfactory about Auden’s poem. Hynes could be describing work that would be done a couple ...”

“... the crashes kept not happening. In front of a Congressional committee in 1982, for instance, he said: ‘Following the economy of the last few years has been rather like watching a mystery thriller in which you can see the dangers lurking around the corner and want to yell a warning but know it won’t be heard. The danger in this case is ...”

“... had been killed in a car crash on 9 November 1966 and replaced by a flawless lookalike. (MI5 were said to have been involved …) What began as a stoner prank took on a demented life of its own. Phantoms, fakes, winks and clues. Prophetic voices, backwards-masked by unseen hands. Off-the-cuff songs revealed to be strange palimpsestic allegories, written on ...”

“... have rarely got a look-in. The British governors in the 1920s and 1930s, Sir Ronald Storrs, Edward Keith-Roach OBE and Sir Arthur Wauchope, had much the same experience as Queen Michal. Simon Sebag Montefiore in his biography of the city rather wistfully describes their rule as a golden age in Jerusalem’s history, when decorous gatherings of religious ...”

“... flight of the mind takes him to famous poems like Paradise Lost, once famous poems such as Edward Young’s Night Thoughts (1742-45), and less familiar works such as Mark Akenside’s The Pleasures of Imagination (1744). He ends with a chapter on Baroque painted ceilings.Celestial ascent at death is an ancient idea. In its earliest known ...”

“... o’clock? Six o’clock? What sort of fucking answer is that?’ Of course I could have said: What sort of fucking question was it in the first place? 3 May. Invited to Speech Day at Giggleswick, where the Guest of Honour is to be Lord Archer. Write back and say I can’t come but I look forward to being invited next year when doubtless the guest ...”

“... a hard row rather successfully. In a carefully considered speech in Manchester in 1999, Monks said that ‘we now live in a world where . . . capitalism reigns supreme. There is nowhere it cannot reach.’ In such a world, he argued, the unions should seek to preserve a European social model based on ‘a sense of mutual reliance, the sense of working ...”

“... an intense, tired, humorous gaze. ‘The problem with politicians is they can’t be honest,’ he said. ‘If they said, “We’re going to privatise the NHS,” they’d be kicked out the next day.’ The Conservative Party’s 2010 manifesto promised: ‘We are stopping the top-down reconfigurations of NHS ...”

“... soirée with him on the Kurfürstendamm which culminates when‘Let me be the first,’ he said, and he bent over nimbly, put his fingertips to the floor and then his knees, and raised his powerful buttocks to me. ‘Come on, fuck-head,’ he said, ‘this is your chance. Hit it big. Come in me, before I come back in ...”

“... available guests, though: Bette Bourne, best known then for appearances with the troupe Bloolips, said yes, and so did two members of La Gran Scena Opera Company. We were hoping for a certain amount of technical discussion, perhaps even scraps of a masterclass, and had borrowed a screen from one of the Grassmarket’s antique shops in case our performers felt ...”