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“... full of songs and stories’, a rooted world of crofts and farms stirred by travelling tinkers, stone-breakers and mendicant old soldiers, where a small boy could take lessons from ‘Dancy Reid, one of the last travelling Highland dance teachers’. Eventually, Henderson’s mother took a position as a cook-housekeeper in a large house near Yeovil: a part ...”

“... off: ‘Be kissed.’1 May, Oxford. Outside the Museum of Natural History in Parks Road is a large stone disc curved, faceted and looking like a giant turtle shell. The label says it’s a ‘septarian concretion’, consisting of limestone formed 165 million years ago and found in the Bicester clay in 1984. Similar limestone concretions, though more the size ...”

“... producing a consensual ‘modern poetry reader’ and creating something more than a stepping-stone between us and several dozen Collected Poems. Armitage and Crawford entitle their introduction ‘The Democratic Voice’, binding the last fifty years of poetry into its wider social and cultural contexts – education acts, decolonisation, immigration ...”

“... function of indexes since the great days of white male writers, when William F. Buckley sent Norman Mailer a copy of his book The Unmaking of a Mayor and wrote ‘Hi!’ in the index next to Mailer’s name. Job’s comforters will want to be the first to tell you that the entry for ‘clocks and sundials’ in your index was printed without the first ...”

“... everyone who did business with him. James Garner called him a ‘shallow, insecure hustler’. Norman Jewison remembered him as slick: ‘Even his hair was combed straight back from his forehead, slicked down flat over his scalp.’ James Harbert, a music arranger at Columbia Records, was more charitable, declaring himself ‘one of the people who, despite ...”

“... unknown to the cartographers of Islam, a Saxon king who defeated a king of Norway is defeated by a Norman duke.’ Khayyám’s work on cubic equations remains fundamental. It seems it was a sideline, versifying. Composing quatrains was a cultured pastime, just as the Heian Japanese a century or so before amused themselves in idle moments by writing blazons to ...”

“... aired and some understanding achieved. Contrast this with Question Time on BBC 1 last night with Norman Tebbit, Shirley Williams and some unidentified industrialist. Tebbit played his usual role of a sneer on legs, snarling and heaping contempt on any vaguely liberal view and the discussion, which was no discussion at all, was rancorous and rowdy and left ...”

“... his youth among a generation of thrawn poets with their country expansiveness: I’m thinking of Norman MacCaig in his Assynt mode; Iain Crichton Smith of the Highlands; George Mackay Brown in his Orkney remoteness; and Hugh MacDiarmid, always in among the fields and dykes, metaphysical or real. None of these men gave much quarter, and, next to them, Morgan ...”

“... of peonies L. has sent for my birthday I slip on the wet flags and fall down three or four of the stone steps into the area. It’s a fall long enough for me to think, ‘This is quite serious,’ as it’s going on, but when I get up I find I’m all right and it’s only when I’ve had a bath and am having a lie-down that I realise that this is one of ...”

“... device, a point of view. She appends a small anthology of the poems, well translated by Peter Norman, that she deems necessary for an understanding of her narrative. Anatoly Nayman, a poet and playwright, was, along with Joseph Brodsky and Dmitry Bobyshev, one of a group of young writers whom Akhmatova made her spiritual children. He met her in 1959 and ...”

“... were climbing the southwest face of Montségur to the white walls that ride its summit like a stone ship’. And all this, Kenner reminds us, without any real hope of recognition from an increasingly philistine culture. By the late Seventies, when the Author lay dead or dying, the Modernist demi-god had dwindled to a ghost in the textual machine. The play ...”

“... But when they’re one-to-one they’re just the same as anybody else, and he’s a big lad, 18 stone, the one that cracked him. The policeman jumped on his back – he’d have been better-off jumping on a tiger. He swung him round like a doll, gave him two beautiful cracks and bumped him with his head. He got his head under his arm and threw his helmet ...”

“... laughed at in effigy’. Now, if he was not laughed at it was only because he was turning to stone in the public memory. There were indeed a number of monstrosities. That the grandest monument of all, George Gilbert Scott’s Albert Memorial, was also a great work of High Victorian art was the result of good luck rather than judgment, which the queen ...”

“... of Wordsworth’s ‘single sheep, and the one blasted tree, / And the bleak music of that old stone wall’. But if art enables and liberates its audience, it can also disable and enslave the subsequent generation of writers. In To Jerusalem and Back, Saul Bellow notes that ‘in every generation we recognise a leader race of masterminds whose ideas ...”

“... to the casual eye like just another part of Trafalgar Square, all Corinthian columns and Portland stone. ABK never recovered, and neither did the sort of modern architecture – committed to social change and uncompromising design – that the Ahrends family devoted their lives to. This intriguing, rather unprofessional account will be easily lost among the ...”