“... stone structure. The Barrans Fountain was built by the Victorian clothing manufacturer Sir John Barran, once also the city’s mayor. He must have been a man with ambition. A building he constructed in the city centre is Moorish and beautiful, a small glimpse of Granada in the middle of West Yorkshire, though it was nothing more grand than a ...”

“... close of World War II. He attended Harvard, where he began a close friendship with his classmate, John Ashbery. After a year (1950-51) in Michigan writing and translating poetry, he moved to New York, where he rejoined his Harvard friends and their friends – among them the poets Kenneth Koch, James Schuyler and Barbara Guest – becoming part of a social ...”

“... place. Only Luke’s Jesus is sent to the court of Herod and returned to Pilate’s jurisdiction. John, but not the others, is privy to the dialogue Pilate had with Jesus (‘What is truth?’) and John alone credits him with certain memorable sayings: ‘Behold the man,’ and ‘What I have written I have written.’ It ...”

“... former lover and her child; they clean the skeletons up and take to carting them round the woods. Mortimer is initially concerned with avenging himself on Dee and reclaiming the evidence, but he soon graduates to fairly random attacks on all who cross his path – all, that is, except the poisonous Sidney Farté, who is delighted when Mortimer chops ...”

“... Thomas’s death the family fractured. Frances ran away, abandoning the children to her parents, John and Alice Jennings. When she reappeared two months later it was to take over the lease on the Moorfields stables and transfer it to her new young husband, William Rawlings. Her parents watched as she drove their once prosperous business into the ...”

“... have warmly agreed. The climactic episode in The Ordeal of Richard Feverel is a walk through the woods, a breezy aesthetic experience which marks the hero’s moral regeneration. (You are reminded of Irving Babbitt’s unforgiving remark about Coleridge’s Ancient Mariner, ‘relieved of the burden of his transgression by admiring the colour of ...”

“... If there was a single figure whose ideas seemed pertinent in that deeply ambiguous moment, it was John Maynard Keynes. The implosion of the financial system vindicated him against his critics, who had declared markets self-stabilising and government intervention counterproductive. With trade, investment and consumption collapsing and millions cast into ...”

“... in 1968. Several of their colleagues are from the North: the poets Seamus Heaney, Seamus Deane, John Montague, Michael Longley. Deane, especially, has been important to them, arguing about Irish literature and the question of tradition, the North, the two languages, the available rhetorics. I have been reading The Crane Bag in association with Hugh ...”

“... and very satisfactory’, one of the chief pleasures being ‘getting back into male society’. John Cornford fought in Spain as a zealous young Communist, but his letters to Margot Heinemann reflect the same first-term-in-a-new-school excitement, the same all-male exhilaration. ‘I did quite well that day,’ he said of his success in rescuing a gun from ...”

“... agenda tied to its tail, one which was destructive of social solidarities, while the right-wing John Redwood objected that it came veined with social-democratic notions which discouraged governments like Britain’s from making up their minds to be independent nation states in charge of their own economy and their own politics. The different styles of ...”

“... rival for class valedictorian. She introduced him to her favourite English poets: Sidney, Spenser, John Clare. When he was unhappy at Dartmouth (he found all the hazing and fraternity business childish), he buried himself in Palgrave’s Golden Treasury.He had begun writing verse by the time he dropped out and returned home in November 1892, having lasted less ...”

“... the castle-clock!From her sunk eyes a stagnant tearStole forth, unsettled by the shock;But oft the woods renewed their green,Ere the tired head of Scotland’s QueenReposed upon the block!Even poor Swinburne had a try. His ‘Adieux à Marie Stuart’ is not as bad as Brodsky’s poem, but it definitely comes second:But surely though it die or live,    Your ...”

“... in the world when it was wrecked in the late 16th century. The ship gave its name to Port Saint John, where it is believed to have sunk on its return from Cochin China, with a cargo of spices and china, but my friend has been picking up a quantity of cannonshot as well as pieces of willow pattern-like china. Drilling down into the sandbank at the edge of ...”

“... and elsewhere. Vidal describes the process through the eyes of his characters, Brooks Adams, John Hay, Theodore Roosevelt and a host of others. While Kennedy coolly analyses everything in terms of long-term trends, Vidal’s concerns are with the personalities involved – the indecisive McKinley and the ludicrous Teddy Roosevelt. His latest collection ...”

“... before his 28th birthday, Henri Fournier was reported missing after a reconnaissance patrol in the woods between Metz and Verdun. His body was never recovered. Over the next fifty years, the evidence of the story he had left open to the world was published bit by bit: his correspondence with Jacques Rivière in 1926 (enlarged in 1948), his family letters in ...”