“... Thomas had been among his guides from the outset. Heaney’s ‘Follower’, from his first book, Death of a Naturalist (1966), took soundings from ‘As the team’s head-brass’: its tripping between ‘furrow’ and ‘narrowed’, ‘fell’ and ‘follow’ nods to Thomas’s strewn doublings ...”

“... then in force. Here comes the difference. The young woman who leaked the Cruise missile document, Sarah Tisdall, was prosecuted under the Act and sent to prison for six months. Leon Brittan was not prosecuted. He was knighted and later appointed as European Commissioner. Collette Bowe (who, after all, was only carrying out orders) was not prosecuted. She kept ...”

“... year, having composed an ode celebrating the Jameson Raid and the well-known lines on the death of Edward VII. Along the electric wires the message came, He is no better, he is much the same. That at least is funny – indeed positively good in its way – and preferable to the era of Ghastly Good Taste in public verses that was to follow. Even ...”

“... clever, frequently cloying. The story it tells is that of the life and aesthetically pleasing death by suicide of Edwin, 11-year-old author of Cartoons, a novel, we are told, of genius. It is also that of Edwin’s biographer, Jeffrey, a mere half-year older, whose exhaustively solemn record of his lifelong friend’s minutest peculiarities and ...”

“... young women with a blade hidden in the tripod and recording their expressions at the moment of death. Mark himself was used by his camera-obsessed father, who particularly enjoyed capturing ‘the reactions of the nervous system to fear’. In a home movie of Mark as a child, Powell appears as the tyrant father and his son as Mark. Powell implicates ...”

“... and glamour. Diana’s dresses, exhibited at Kensington Palace more than twenty years after her death, still drew the crowds. Last year Prince Charles came higher than David Gandy and David Beckham in GQ’s rankings for best-dressed Briton. The queen has been a global celebrity longer than anyone anywhere.The contract between the royal family and the ...”

“... to works in prose: Ros Barber’s The Marlowe Papers took the Desmond Elliott Prize in 2013 and Sarah Crossan’s One (about conjoined twins) carried off the Carnegie in 2016. These are good omens for The Long Take, which has been long-listed for the Man Booker this year. The Long Take is not just a verse novel, it’s a historical verse novel set in the ...”

“... leaving their father doubly burdened by grief and an inability to avenge his eldest son’s death. In despair, King Hrethel abandons life’s joys and chooses ‘God’s light’, i.e. he either dies of grief or enters a monastery. In the Historia Brittonum Arthur slays his own son, there called Amr, without recognising him. Amr is buried in a ...”

“... his argument for yet another biography on the view he claims the world has had of her since her death as ‘a Diana before Diana’. This is a pitch of sorts, sure enough, but what grips me is why he would want to do it. Imagine making the effort to think of a reason to write a biography of Princess Margaret. Imagine committing months of working life to ...”

“... departments to pledge to improve the proportion of women in ‘leadership’ positions. As Sarah Banet-Weiser observes, the rhetoric of female ‘empowerment’ is now a standard marketing tool. Feminism hasn’t just acquired establishment approval, it has managed to become voguish. As Banet-Weiser puts it, we are ‘living in a moment in North ...”

“... consider Claudine de Tencin, daughter of a provincial judge who sent her to a nunnery. After his death she sued to gain release from her vows, moved to Paris, and in a startlingly short time became one of the grand literary hostesses of Paris, as well as mistress to the prime minister and several other leading figures. She used her political influence to ...”

“... in the second of his sonnets for Jarrell, the one that restages his friend’s peculiar death (Jarrell was sideswiped by a car in the course of an evening walk): black-gloved, black-coated, you plod out stubbornly as if in lockstep to grasp your blank not-I at the foot of the tunnel … as if asleep, Child Randall, greeting the car, and approving ...”

“... and Randolph was barred, for a time, from all social occasions of political significance. Sarah Churchill lived on an emotional high-wire as an actress, and Diana committed suicide in the last year of Churchill’s life. Only Mary, with her husband Christopher Soames, provided a sheet-anchor of stability. Where Churchill’s public life is ...”

“... wrote a note, rearranged the family photographs on the mantelpiece and hanged himself. Curtis’s death was inevitably seen as authenticating his dark lyrics, though at the time the content of the lyrics hadn’t been clear even to those close to the band. In 1978, Morley wrote that he had given up trying to make out the words (he blamed ‘the perils of fast ...”

“... covered in earth’. Missing in the photographs is his hair colour. In 1896, crushing heavily on Sarah Bernhardt (she had dazzled him at her salon, reclining on a polar bear pelt next to her pet lion), Renard told her that before age and experience turned him blond, he was ‘a redhead, once, downright ginger and frankly vicious’. We hear about this in his ...”