“... Dylan Thomas poems, however, is well beyond the competence of other stars in the firmament, even Paul McCartney. There have been various, normally embarrassing attempts by rock groups, or ex-members of rock groups going solo, to explore musical ‘concepts’ and create ‘avant-garde’ albums, but Cale moved in the other direction, from the world of La ...”

“... river and crossed back via a little hand-pulled ferry to find the secretary of state for Wales, Paul Murphy, sitting with three clergymen on the other bank. Back to our lodging to discover that two more heads have rolled: Julie Kirkbride and Margaret Moran. 29 May. Like those in the Big Brother house we wake up each day to see who is in danger of ...”

“... noted committed Trumpistas (Rudy Giuliani, Newt Gingrich, Chris Christie); a few party stalwarts (Paul Ryan, Mitch McConnell – who was booed) taking a sip of, if not exactly drinking the Trump Kool-Aid; and a breadline of hungry ‘rising stars’, fixed on the 2020 elections, hoping to be discovered as Barack Obama was at the 2004 Democratic Convention. On ...”

“... It makes for unbearable reading.)The Dorns are among a second tier of correspondents, along with Paul Blackburn, Duncan, Allen Ginsberg, Kerouac, Louis Zukofsky and Denise Levertov. There are nearly three hundred letters in this selection, the majority of them to men. Apart from Levertov, a regular correspondent, the only women he seems to have written to ...”

“... that it also reflected his strait-laced German mother’s high Protestant ideals. Martin Seymour-Smith, Graves’s first biographer and a close friend, traces the demonic bloodlust of the White Goddess all the way back to Graves’s cradle: ‘The infant looked up into its mother’s face, and sensed that – without much ambiguity – she wanted to kill ...”

“... spirit of the new music in the same way that the voice of Mahalia Jackson identified Gospel. John Smith’s discography of Johnny Cash, who was resident in Memphis at the time and also benefited from Phillips’s expertise, contributes to the idea of a movement. Presley’s intelligence, however, has always been in doubt. Joe Esposito, his infamous ...”

“... In a far more sober study, The Road to Nuremberg, which is no less thoroughly documented, Bradley Smith describes how difficult it was for the Allies to agree on the policy to be followed towards members of the Nazi Party and to war criminals. Allied leaders and officials were genuinely puzzled, not shuffle-footed. Churchill’s instinct was to execute the ...”

“... to Inglis because the family had already given his papers to the Welsh historian, Dai Smith), or the records of the organisations in which he worked – John McIlroy, in his fine study of Williams in adult education, the basis of Inglis’s Chapters 6 and 7, though he contrives not to mention it in his acknowledgments, draws liberally on the ...”

“... being an outsider and reinforced his grievances against his father. (He adored his mother.)Herbert Smith, his English teacher, became his mentor. During the summer of 1922, just before Robert started at Harvard, Smith accompanied the boy (at his parents’ request) on a visit to his quintessentially Wasp chum from the ...”

“... one day, he would preach the next. Towards the end of his sentence, the Bedfordshire justices sent Paul Cobb, a clerk of the peace, to obtain Bunyan’s submission. Had Bunyan been willing to sue for pardon and to admit that he had wrongfully convened the meeting at Lower Samsell, he would have been freed, but he refused. Bunyan told Cobb he was willing to ...”

“... galleries, alongside woodwork from the period. The curator who acquires it, Harold Clifford Smith, is an upper-middle-class Englishman straight out of central casting: the son of a wine merchant, educated at public school and Oxford, devoted to his old college, a regular contributor to Country Life. During the Great War, he serves in the intelligence ...”

“... attribution to Charlotte’s Belgian teacher, Constantin Héger, is laughable: it’s signed ‘Paul Hegér’ (Paul Emmanuel, a character with strong affinities to Héger, is the love-interest in Villette). The date given is 1850; Charlotte left Brussels in 1844. The accent is in the wrong place: Hegér not Héger. It ...”

“... a title, sometimes claims to be less posh than Cameron on the grounds that his public school, St Paul’s, is in London, and he didn’t board. Both sowed the seeds of tabloid merriment by joining a ludicrous club for rich boys while at Oxford, and even Cameron’s much advertised fondness for 1980s bands like The Smiths is best understood, his biographers ...”

“... On 28 November 1988, Paul Ingram, a police officer, was arrested by colleagues in his office in Olympia, Washington State. His daughters, Ericka and Julie, had accused him of sexual molestation. Ingram made no attempt to deny the charges. He couldn’t remember doing anything, but he said: ‘My girls know me. They wouldn’t lie about something like this ...”

“... set in? Way back in the 18th century, analysing the socio-economic situation that was coming, Adam Smith, professor of philosophy in the university at which I had graduated, concluded that the writer would henceforth have to present his books on the market in the same way as socks. And what if you didn’t like ‘knitted literature’ or stink-sock books, but ...”