“... Andrew Crozier has lately written an exceptionally searching essay about British poetry since 1945,* in which Norman MacCaig is named just once in passing. There is nothing wrong with that; Crozier isn’t attempting one of those limp ‘surveys’ in which everyone who deserves mention gets it. All the same I have the impression that a nod in passing – usually, it’s true, complimentary – is the most that MacCaig normally gets from any of us ...”

“... is about as far as the author goes in helping out his audience; and Lermontov, a sophisticated young man who had read all the books of the time, was doubtless familiar with the German concept of ‘romantic irony’, expounded by Tieck; and knew that you can look at a mountain both with awe and wonder, and with a certain amusement that you should be ...”

“... who, in the throes of a break with the émigré Surrealists, was planning a juried show for young artists. Mondrian was one of the jurors. The story of Mondrian’s Nod is that Guggenheim had sorted through the entries herself, segregating the duds, among them Pollock’s Stenographic Figure. On the day of the jury Mondrian showed up before the others ...”

“... and the sentences are good.The door of Huston’s suite was opened by a conservatively attired young man with a round face and pink cheeks. He introduced himself as Arthur Fellows. ‘John is in the next room getting dressed,’ he said. ‘Imagine getting a layout like this all to yourself! That’s the way the big studios do things.’ He nodded with ...”

“... killed the lady, cut her up and buried her in the coal bunker. He then took up with his lover, a young thing called Ethel le Neve. Like many murders before and since, the one carried out by Dr Crippen came to be seen as a reflection on and of its time. All manner of local customs, fashions, ways of speaking, ways of believing, ways of wanting, seemed to come ...”

“... When​ I was young I thought poetry and poetry anthologies could change the world. ‘If a man were permitted to make all the ballads,’ Andrew Fletcher of Saltoun wrote, ‘he need not care who should make the laws of a nation.’ But nationality still mattered: Seamus Heaney’s reaction to his inclusion in Blake Morrison and Andrew Motion’s 1982 Penguin Book of Contemporary British Poetry was ‘My passport’s green ...”

“... to sneak a little architecture back into things. He had some clear ambitions: appoint hungry young architects, let them colonise not just the surface but the internal spaces as well (Holden never got far below ground), spend more money on some stations than others – and above all, make it happen. He was not against variety. Because of the dimensions of ...”

“... Look at any postcard of an interwar Islington street, and you will see why. Soon though, as the young started to heap their avant-garde disdain on suburbia, the centre embarked on a come-back, only to have its fragile renaissance crushed by bombers and planners. Since then, hopes and fears for London have yo-yoed, along with the values on its Stock Exchange ...”

“... the coloured water and all evidence of their grisly end could go down the plughole. When he was a young professional, the most popular way for women, he told me, ‘was gas. Just stopping up the windows and doors and lying down in the kitchen with their head in a clean oven.’ (On the subject of ovens Craig had warned: ‘Grease splashed and food spilt in an ...”

“... Hardy was from a Southern family of slave-owners and Confederates; his father died when Oliver was young, and the boy grew up in the lobby of his mother’s hotel in Madison, Georgia. Conventional wisdom has always supported the view that Stan Laurel was the genius of the two, that Hardy was just a jobbing actor who turned up on time and spoke his lines. (It ...”

“... described at that time its more insidious effects on Iraqi society. An entire generation of young people had grown up in isolation from the outside world. He compared them, ominously, to the orphans of the Russian war in Afghanistan who later formed the Taliban. ‘What should be of concern is the possibility at least of more fundamentalist Islamic ...”

“... of the biological world for the next fifty years. In 1795, Geoffroy recruited Georges Cuvier, a young and relatively obscure naturalist. Cuvier was born in 1769, in a Protestant region close to the Swiss border, and was educated in Germany. As tutor to the son of a wealthy Protestant family in Normandy, he found time, pottering on the seashore, to refine ...”

“... thirty years after the best of them began to publish – John James, Chris Torrance, Lee Harwood, Andrew Crozier, Peter Riley, J.H. Prynne, Michael Haslam, Douglas Oliver, Barry MacSweeney, Denise Riley – they must nonetheless wonder, from time to time, whether theirs is a case of having missed the boat which would only have been worth catching if they’d ...”

“... or ‘perfumed’. I opened it up and I can remember well enough the sentence I read. ‘The young odalisques in the harim were also instructed in the exquisite use of their fingernails.’ Something close to that, at any rate. I was not sure what an odalisque was, but the word ‘harim’ (why not ‘harem’) gave me a clue. And I had to read on, to ...”

“... devotion to the Nabokov cause and his mastery of out-of-the-way works was ingratiating. The young man (still under thirty) was summoned to Montreux in 1968, and commissioned to put together a complete bibliography of Nabokov’s publications. Out of this came an intimate acquaintance which encouraged Field to write in May 1968, ‘answering an unplaced ...”