“... English, French; pianist; willing to care for children; highest credentials. Write Box 4435, Frost-Smith Advertising, London EC2.’27 May 1938: ‘Young Austrian lady (Jewish) seeks position Governess; experienced; good references; teaches German, French, Italian; would accept modest salary; good family. Write Box T.1653, The Times, EC4.’6 June ...”

“... is a controversial hi-tech agricultural company, ‘crossing wheat with Arctic cod to make it frost resistant [and] lemons with bullet ants to give them extra zest’, while the Man Group is an investment management business, though the James Man who founded the original company was an 18th-century barrel-maker (his firm supplied the navy with rum for ...”

“... His older twin, Jesse Garon, was stillborn. (There was ugly gossip later that the doctor, William Robert Hunt, might have had a drink; that he might have saved Jesse if he hadn’t been so preoccupied with the surprise appearance of a second child. But the Presleys were satisfied with his work and Dr Hunt received his standard $15 payment from the county.) In ...”

“... Partisan Review, the Kenyon Review and Sewanee Review, with a good deal of auto-canonising. Robert Lowell, almost by default it seemed, was ceded pride of place, the ‘most important American poet now at work’. Lowell and Randall Jarrell, roommates at Kenyon College in the 1930s, and to a lesser extent Berryman too, were big on rating and ...”

“... last year in your garden,/Has it begun to sprout? Will it bloom this year?/Or has the sudden frost disturbed its bed?’; ‘And you wait for a knock and the turning of a lock for you know the hangman’s waiting for you/And perhaps you’re alive/And perhaps you’re dead/Hoo ha ha/Hoo ha ha/Hoo.’ The tight grip that Valerie (who died in 2012) kept on ...”

“... his smiling face, pegged out to the horizon. There was transparent sheeting as a guard against the frost, played about by a shimmer of soft artificial lights. What was this? Was it Art? Nature? Some kind of installation? And what did all those identical Enos smell like?Eno has haunted me for more than fifty years, ever since I first saw Roxy Music on Top of ...”

“... outrageous human cost to both black and white. In a superb chapter, ‘Towards Australia’, Alan Frost argues that the Aborigines were dispossessed, the convicts exiled and exploited, so that Britain might have a far-south strategic base which could also serve as an off-shore gaol, conveniently remote. Whatever fine words were spoken at the initial ...”

“... Moorhouse’s book on the Pilgrimage of Grace and have reached the point in October 1536 when Robert Aske and the huge rebel host are at Doncaster waiting to move south, virtually unopposed. It’s a campaign that would surely have changed the course of history and might even have deposed Henry VIII, though this was not the rebels’ aim. They ...”

“... travelled. Look it up.’ Norman looked it up in the Dictionary of Quotations to find that it was Robert Frost. ‘I know the word for you,’ said the Queen. ‘Maam?’ ‘You run errands, you change my library books, you look up awkward words in the dictionary and find me quotations. Do you know what you are?’ ‘I used to be a ...”

“... the bodies of your friends. Jarman made a note in his diary in April 1989: ‘Since autumn: Terry, Robert, David, Ken, Paul, Howard. All the brightest and best trampled to death – surely even the Great War brought no more loss into one life in just 12 months, and all this as we made love not war.’ In March 1992: ‘We talked of the people who died of Aids ...”

“... centre. Through Hunt, Keats met Shelley, Godwin, Wordsworth, Hazlitt, Lamb, the painter Benjamin Robert Haydon, and many others who would challenge and comfort him, patronise and defend him, feud over and around him, get drunk and silly with him, delight and disgust him, and otherwise matter to him during this period of explosive poetic growth in what were ...”

“... sent copies of poems they had been working on to famous poets, including the poet laureate Robert Southey. We don’t have Charlotte’s letter to Southey, or know which poems she sent, but parts of her letter are quoted in his and show her extravagant style of praise – she begs him to ‘stoop from his throne of light and glory’ – which he ...”

“... In the UK, grumbling over record prices at the pumps has led the former Brexit secretary David Frost to call for fracking to be revived. Boris Johnson has coyly hinted at jettisoning COP26 targets and increasing North Sea hydrocarbon production. In the US, while proponents of green energy are calling for an acceleration of investment in renewables, the ...”

“... between them. When you read the conversation that ensued you find that they end up agreeing over a Robert Lowell poem, ‘For the Union Dead’. It was agreed by both to have emotional content but also to have a sort of marmoreal shapeliness.Well, it is one of Lowell’s best poems. Was the dialogue edited much?No, we let them be as they were. And I think ...”