“... in his book Fan-Mail (1977), for example, owe an obvious debt to Auden’s epistle. So do Charles Osborne’s self-advertising ‘Letter to W.H. Auden’ (‘The fact is that I’m writing a huge book/About you – it’s a kind of ‘Life and Works’ – / In which I aim to take a searching look/At all your poems, books and plays, your ...”

“... the other luminaries, many of whom pass through his pages leaving hardly a trace. David Frost, Charles Douglas-Home, Andrew Knight (the editor of the Economist), Frank Giles, Richard Kershaw, Stephen Spender and others eat and drink their way, sometimes to Tehran, but never, it would seem, to saying anything very ...”

“... for widely differing reasons) Mr Paisley, Mr Gerry Adams, Dr Conor Cruise O’Brien and Mr Charles Haughey. Another is that it has divided Fianna Fail into two very unequal sections. Whether this realignment manifests itself in an increase in the number of deaths which litter the North’s daily calendar depends in part on the reaction of the ...”

“... archive, however, and historians will be glad that her book appears more or less in parallel to Charles Wilson’s valuable history of Smith’s, First with the News.* Between the Exhibition and the advent of the ‘new journalism’, during the 1880s and 1890s, there had already been highly significant changes in the scope and scale of press ...”

“... effectively besmirch our heroes to suit their left-wing woke narrative’. In the Telegraph, Charles Moore complained that the National Trust had been ‘rolled over by extremists’, and Andrew Brigden, another Tory MP, that it had been ‘overtaken by divisive Black Lives Matter supporters’. The Telegraph, the Express and the Daily Mail all reported ...”

“... 1685 the Duke of York, who had been brought up in exile as a Roman Catholic, succeeded his brother Charles II as king and became ex officio head of the Church of England. On any view this was going to be a problem, and James II as he now was, egged on by his theological advisers, made the worst of it. Among other unwise moves he declared the Test Acts, which ...”

“... was arrested the next day in Birmingham. The five were taken to Morecambe police station where Dr Frank Skuse, a Home Office forensic scientist, tested their hands for evidence of contact with explosives. Meanwhile a posse of detectives from the West Midlands Serious Crimes Squad headed up the motorway to interview the suspects. In Morecambe Skuse conducted a ...”

“... a familiar face at the casino. Guillaume, meanwhile, was enrolled in the exclusive Collège Saint-Charles, where he did well, winning numerous prizes. Apollinaire probably picked up from Walt Whitman his habit of naming himself in his poems: ‘Je me disais Guillaume il est temps que tu viennes’ (‘I said to myself Guillaume it is time that you ...”

“... not a little danger in his own make-up – perhaps he wishes there was more. Aitken is sometimes frank about the great defects of Nixon’s character, but overall he wishes to exonerate him from the worst of what he’s been blamed for, including Watergate. He rightly points out that Nixon was hardly the first to play dirty: as Attorney-General, Bobby ...”

“... domestic surveillance programme, determined that the man who had fallen from the window was Frank Olson, a chemist employed by the CIA. Hersh disclosed his findings to Olson’s family, who convened a press conference and announced that they would be suing the agency. Ford’s chief of staff, Donald Rumsfeld, was alerted to the danger by his ...”

“... the academic year 1964-65, when he was a young apprentice academic and Lewis was the visiting Charles Eliot Norton Professor: the differences in age and culture and experience somehow worked to kindle the regard and friendship we instantly felt for each other and found in each other. I was beginning to study the American poetic tradition, and it was ...”

“... F.S.L. Lyons, doyen of historians of modern Ireland, when faced 27 years ago with a short life of Charles Stewart Parnell which took implicit but cheeky issue with his own magnum opus on the Chief. The young Bew – Belfast-born and a graduate of People’s Democracy marches as well as of the Cambridge history faculty – had already published a radical ...”

“... you now is like/seeing a god or a king/naked and starving in a field,’ the poet Rebecca Morgan Frank wrote in ‘Monk Automaton, c.1560’ (2021), an ode to the machine. But clothed and activated the monk becomes uncanny, even whimsical. When placed on a table it traces the path of a seven-pointed shape. With its head turning left to right, and its eyes ...”

“... the knack/Of looking fierce in pins and black,/The suburbs wouldn’t want you back’), and the frank versions of a gay overworld (‘Yet when I’ve had you once or twice/I may not want you any more’) would have made him a guru here; I presumed that his recent elegies on the deaths of friends from Aids would have made him a central figure in the literary ...”

“... of nine-tenths of his estate.’ When Baker asked why Rice had done this, Patrick said: ‘To be frank with you, the old man became, as it were, stuck on me; he thought I was the most wonderful man in the world.’ He added that he did not intend to keep the money for himself but, in accordance with Rice’s wishes, ‘to distribute it in great measure to ...”