“... his father’s throne, who, like an evil queen in a fairy tale demanding strawberries be picked in snow, counts on his rival dying in the attempt. Jason builds the Argo, gathers together a band of heroes and sets out for the Black Sea. Medea differs from other tragic heroes and heroines, from Oedipus or Antigone or Hecuba or Jason himself, in that she is the ...”

“... uncomplaining discomfort’. In this annoyance she feels a kinship with Plath, in whose essay ‘Snow Blitz’ she finds ‘American impatience with English passivity and its attendant moral superiority’.Fed up with the slow and ‘sickly trains’ (British Rail plays a major role in this quest), she decides to take a taxi from Cornwall to Milverton in ...”

“... stretches from Hölderlin to Rilke and Celan. Unlike them, however, he is little known in Britain. Michael Hamburger’s translations established Hölderlin and Celan in English, but he was less fortunate with Trakl, and Decline, his pamphlet of 1952, was not reprinted. There was a larger selection by James Wright and Robert Bly in 1961; and Hamburger’s ...”

“... first time I saw, or looked repeatedly at, a painting by Frank Auerbach was in the art historian Michael Podro’s living room – it must have been in 1968. The painting was Primrose Hill, Autumn Morning. I’d barely heard of Auerbach at that point (modern painting for me was French and American), and I certainly didn’t have a clue who had done the ...”

“... so palpably in a certain history. Behind the glistening meadows and the huntsmen in the snow one catches the smell of autocracy and public burnings, of permanent warfare and bankers with impeccable taste. I have found over the years that looking at Courbet and Poussin leads a viewer in contrary directions. Sometimes it matters intensely, and seems ...”

“... streets. Founded by the charismatic Corneliu Codreanu in the 1920s, the Legion of the Archangel Michael (also known as the Iron Guard) was a fellowship of poor students, patriots, brutes and dreamers close to the peasant roots that most Romanians shared, and heavily invested in the symbolism of Orthodox Christianity. The misery and discontent of the ...”

“... were dramatised, rather as the lines of the plough are more striking when there is a light fall of snow. We know from photographs (and common sense) that the sculpture did not look like this when new and cannot claim that Jagger was likely to have anticipated the effect. Moreover, soot was an agent in the deterioration of the stone. Beck was taken to court by ...”

“... its discourses. The subject, in Auden’s plays, is constructed out of these delusive discourses. Michael Ransom in F6 had acknowledged somewhat abstractly that he, too, was implicated in ‘the web of guilt that prisons every upright person’, that like all the others he is ‘swept and driven by the possessive incompetent fury and the disbelief’. But he ...”

“... is attributed to Steinitz during the days he spent shuffling barefoot through the New York snow: either the legends last better than the players, or the players find the legends too attractive not to steal them from one another. The heroism is bluster. But chess is more than war. I regret only half-appreciating the beauty of some abstract moves, of ...”

“... families owned, the forklift-truck dealership, the security-guard agency, the hardware store, the snow-ploughing service, the petrol company, the upholsterer, the dress shop, the fruit stand. Those who had no relations who owned small businesses mentioned Cuban refugees who built boats or Cambodian refugees who operated doughnut shops. Owners of firms that ...”

“... where there was no people, no houses, but heavy heather; sleeping in shore dens, with frost and snow covering our beds for five days and five nights, until they made turf cottages … The land of my birth I would prefer to any, where there was no want of food, and no debt. We’re sweaty and satisfied as we get back to the van at Angus Beaton’s ...”

“... early poems phrases demand to be noted (‘each slovenly grief’, ‘the dingy hospital of snow’) so that one’s tempted to include the whole poem, if only to preserve the phrase. Not that Larkin would thank one for saying so (or saying anything), the awareness of his contempt, even though it’s posthumous, a real deterrent.Cars abandoned by the ...”

“... Somewhere in the Netherlands a postwoman is in trouble. Bad health, snow and ice and a degree of chaos in her personal life have left her months behind on her deliveries. She rents a privatised ex-council flat with her partner and so many crates of mail have built up in the hallway that it’s getting hard to move around ...”

“... which many, including Kim Stanley Robinson and Lem’s most crucial English translator, Michael Kandel, claim as their favourite, and the paranoid-picaresque novels Memoirs Found in a Bathtub and The Futurological Congress, which as a teenage reader I made my talismans.The preoccupations of Lem Two resemble those of Lem One. The ...”

“... 14-liner Pushkin invented for Eugene Onegin. This last he adopts for his letter from Moscow to Michael Frayn. Here the subject curdles unpleasantly and James the Cold Warrior puts in an appearance. I am sorry to see him joining Bernard Levin in offering a thanksgiving for the bomb which has guaranteed four decades of peace in Europe. It’s true that any ...”