“... you read over the work it’s clear that St Lucia was always a presence even when Walcott was in North America and Europe. He came home when he reached his eighties, and he’s unlikely to leave again except on short trips (the Globe will stage Omeros next month and maybe he’ll get to London). It’s odd, in a world fizzing with insects and furious ...”

“... in hospital. He booked himself into a psychiatric treatment-and-research department in the north of Moscow. I realised Alexey was in a hospital ward when I saw the photos he was posting on Facebook: ‘Welcome to my new home,’ he joked. It seemed fitting that my Facebook feed was filling up with posts from a mental institution. As the conflict over ...”

“... a reassuring feeling of continuity and survival. Now, blocking the view of the vast horizon to the north, there will be that silly bridge carrying more cars to a gigantic third airport. Little of Istanbul – the Istanbul of high-rises, unfinished corporate spires, highways and bare street life that stretches across an area nearly four times the size of London ...”

“... I would feel uncomfortable. Philology, according to the OED, was first used in English by John Skelton in the 1520s of ‘the branch of knowledge that deals with the historical, linguistic, interpretative and critical aspects of literature’. The earliest usages of the word philologist in the 17th century are often qualified by an adjective of praise ...”

“... them. In France, the 18th century gave us Chardin, the 19th Corot, and the 20th Braque: all true north on the artistic compass. Their relationship with their descendants is sometimes one of influence, more usually one of semi-private conversation across the centuries (Lucian Freud doing versions of Chardin, Hodgkin painting ‘After Corot’). But it also ...”

“... her, she expresses a ‘horrified giddiness’ at moving into a house near the slums of Boston’s North End. His father, Robert Traill Spence Lowell III, a naval officer until his wife forced him to retire, is bland, impotent, empty, an ‘“unhistoric” soul’ whose death is ‘abrupt and unprotesting’. Lowell himself is a ‘churlish’ brat with an ...”

“... his other side, a sculpture of a floating, veiled female figure, reminiscent of the neo-baroque of North Italian cemeteries; there are Japanese ceramics on the chimney piece, and a Roman bust high above the mirror. Surely he was an art lover, or wished to be thought of as one, but he was devoted to art that Clark’s friends Berenson, Duveen and Fry would have ...”

“... Front’s 168 candidates secured an average vote of 8.9 per cent. During a Commons debate in July, John Stokes, the Conservative MP for Halesowen and Stourbridge, a former admirer of General Franco and a supporter of the Monday Club, pointed to the growing constituency for the National Front and insisted that ‘a date must soon be fixed beyond which no ...”

“... make possible the creation of the Roman Catholic Cathedral of Westminster, the masterpiece of John Francis Bentley, opened in 1903 and consecrated in 1910.Barry recognises the significance of the cathedral, even though it is consigned to his epilogue. More than 120 coloured stones from at least two dozen countries can be found there, some of them ...”

“... Rotterdam​ city centre sits a few miles inland from the North Sea, its skyscrapers and office buildings lining the New Meuse River, a tributary of the Rhine. A ferry tour takes you past ship repair yards, grain silos, terminals receiving coal and iron ore for Ruhr Valley industries, and even a massive orange juice storage facility that receives its cargo from Latin America ...”

“... called James Reeves McCullers, Jr. They married when she was 20 and he was 24, and set up house in North Carolina. The detail that somehow sticks with you is that she wore knee-high socks to the wedding. At first glance, Carson and Reeves seem like the last people who should have entered into a heterosexual covenant. Despite Carson’s remark that Reeves was ...”

“... construction for more than a decade, and it is only because Young casts his net so wide (taking in John Betjeman’s travel documentaries and the 2012 Olympic opening ceremony among other things) that his choices don’t end up looking a little predictable. For this reason Offbeat is a useful supplement to his book (though it’s much more than that) since the ...”

“... and the social. Bobby’s diving, his wanderings along the Gulf Coast and his roamings around North America offer great scope for McCarthy’s powers of description. Underwater in the wrecked plane, Bobby ‘kicked his way slowly down the aisle above the seats, his tanks dragging overhead. The faces of the dead inches away. Everything that could float was ...”

“... Dr Richard Barter, who got the measure of cholera twenty years before the more famous physician John Snow. The rising generation of British officials had a special reverence for the Arabs of the desert, with their ‘wild independence’ and ‘manly frankness’. Alliances with the Wahhabi were mooted seventy years before the explorer Captain William ...”

“... as protector. Britain had been approached a number of times, but the Empire had no vacancies. Lord John Russell defined his attitude to Mexico in what could serve as a permanent axiom of British diplomacy: ‘it would be ... unwise to provoke the ill feeling of North America unless some paramount object were in prospect, and ...”