“... demand. For most of his career Shakespeare not only enjoyed the backing of a single company (the Lord Chamberlain’s Men, later the King’s Men), but had the singular advantage of working in a symbiotic relationship with a group of fellow actors whose skills he learned how to develop as he was testing and exploring his own genius. Middleton, while valuing ...”

“... as an assassin. You don’t bring in a 37-year-old woman to review John Updike in the year of our Lord 2019 unless you’re hoping to see blood on the ceiling. ‘Absolutely not,’ I said when first approached, because I knew I would try to read everything, and fail, and spend days trying to write an adequate description of his nostrils, and all I would be ...”

“... She looks down at him, this importunate upper-class dandy serenading under her balcony. ‘Home, my lord!’ she says firmly. And then this: What you can say is most unseasonable; what sing, Most absonant and harsh. Nay, your perfume, Which I smell hither, cheers not my sense Like our field-violet’s breath. Of ...”

“... on Queensway, London 1949.’4 January. George F. tells me that when Andrew Lloyd Webber, the Lord Lloyd Webber, as we must now say, bought his Canaletto at Christie’s he paid the £10 million bill by Access in order to earn the air miles – enough presumably to last him till the end of his days. Such lacing of extravagance with prudence has since ...”

“... the year? Not a stir, not a shoot, not a breath. And I know that at some stage that summer I went home and got a message to come back. We had no phone in our house, so I do not know how I was contacted and it was not to say that I was needed for work, but to say that there was something interesting happening in Gorey, too interesting for a 16-year-old to ...”

“... no doubt, of the English public school. It will be obvious that Leverenz likes to stay close to home – as with father-fixations in one section of the United States, in a period of three or four decades, as represented in American works only. There is no attention whatsoever to the possible impingement on those works of English or Classical works wherein ...”

“... domination than a defensive operation designed to stoke up anti-Iranian and anti-Shia feeling at home – even when the Iranian influence is largely invented. ‘We are a primary target for the Iranian regime,’ MBS said in May, shortly before Trump’s visit, accusing the Iranians of seeking to take over Islamic holy sites in Saudi Arabia. ‘We won’t ...”

“... to England, where his older brothers were already being educated. (One of them, Frederic, became lord chancellor in 1938.) He lived with an uncle and aunt in Whitstable – lightly disguised as ‘Blackstable’ in his novels – and developed a stammer, perhaps as a result of being teased about his Frenchified ways. ‘I have never forgotten the roar of ...”

“... when he was still a boy. Some kind people – socialists, as it happened – provided him with a home, a country and ideals. He developed into a warm, idealistic man, dedicated to repaying the kindness shown to him in Vienna by rehabilitating his adopted city in the eyes of foreign Jews. It was to one of the friends he had made in New York during his years ...”

“... by fancy phrases suggests a deeper than aesthetic reaction against what was austerely spun at home. The colour and panache of ‘Snow’ seem to be making up for the dourness of an Ulster childhood. When MacNeice published it in Poems, he put it next to ‘Belfast’, which describes a ‘country of cowled and haunted faces’ where ‘The sun goes down ...”

“... of the lament, Ariadne’s abandonment is fourfold. Two past abandonments: she abandoned her home and herself, for and to Theseus. Two in the present: abandoned by him, she again abandons herself, this time to her feelings in song. Her self-abandoned expression of abandonment is a hieroglyph of all four abandonings. It is a fundamental part of the male ...”

“... I endeavoured to remove their physical traces. I was born on 5 May 1923, in a London nursing home, which occupied a house in an early 19th-century square. The square, Torrington Square, was destroyed in the war. One side of it still stands as a terrace, but I do not know whether this includes the house where I was born, even though I know the number of ...”

“... and happy’. America would have its highway between the oceans, and blacks would have a permanent home where they might enjoy freedom without white recrimination. ‘There is meat in that suggestion, General,’ Lincoln supposedly told Butler. Butler’s story used to be widely accepted. These days, virtually every historian dismisses it. Lincoln’s ...”

“... who recorded that ‘the African (so let me call her, for so in fact she is) took the hint, went home to her master’s, and soon sent what follows.’ In addition to occasional poems prompted by political events or local deaths, Wheatley wrote a number of abstract odes – ‘On Virtue’, ‘On Friendship’, ‘On Imagination’ – in which the language ...”

“... off the English stage for two centuries, introducing the often farcical censorship by the lord chamberlain which was to last into our own day.But there was no worked-out theory of secular free speech until Cato’s notorious letters. These pseudonymous columns, published in the London Journal from 1720 on, provided, from scratch, a fully formed ...”