“... here. More than two hundred years later, this sense had not yet faded; with a cheeky rhyme, Robert Burns attributed such devices to the devil: ‘Then you, ye auld, snic-drawing dog!/Ye came to Paradise incog/An’ play’d on man a cursed brogue.’ By the time Burns was writing, ‘brogue’ also commonly described ‘a rude kind of shoe generally ...”

“... now seem content to name, record, greet, praise and commemorate, making garrulity stand in for craft. To give another egregious example, in ‘Music to Me Is like Days’, the modern       world reverberates with Muzak and Prozac. As it doesn’t with poe-zac (I did meet a Miss Universe named Verstak). Some poems work better: an entertainingly ...”

“... and on the royal favourite Buckingham. There is only one article on a country other than England: Robert Harding’s ‘Aristocrats and Lawyers in French Provincial Government, 1559-1648’. William J. Bouwsma writes on ‘Anxiety and the Formation of Early Modern Culture’. His most interesting point is that the words ‘anxiety’ and ‘anxious’ entered ...”

“... and insinuated as much in various comments in his biography, referring to Francis’s ‘craft and selfishness’ and his ‘inattention to the interests of his Master’. His sneering treatment of Barber was widely condemned, not least by Boswell, who instanced it as an example of the ‘dark uncharitable cast’ of his competitor’s book. Boswell ...”

“... James Fox and other members of the parliamentary opposition attempting to haul to shore a landing craft crammed with an invasion force of the French Republic. In the sky is the head of Henry Dundas, the secretary of war and the allegorical embodiment of a loyalist wind, who blows towards Fox and friends the threatening names of five runners, among them ...”

“... their clothes unaccountably scuffed and torn, with odd fragments of memory: a large cigar-shaped craft with extended wings following their car down the highway; a glimpse of humanoid figures with shiny dark uniforms. Over the weeks that followed, Betty was tormented by dreams in which she and Barney were taken onboard the ship and subjected to a variety of ...”

“... trapped in copper tubes. Or the oracular brazen heads supposedly created by Albertus Magnus, Robert Grosseteste and Roger Bacon. These heads were forged from bronze or brass and activated with the help of arcane knowledge of spirits or celestial conjunctions. Once operational, they were able to predict the future and answer any question. But stories ...”

“... observer than Aristotle, identified the octopus’s main characteristic as ‘mischief and craft’.) What does it feel like to be an octopus? Does it feel like anything at all? Or are octopuses, as Godfrey-Smith puts it, ‘just biochemical machines for which all is dark inside’? This form of question – ‘what is it like to be a bat?’ Thomas ...”

“... and scandal, Maintenant was entirely written and published by Cravan: the other contributors (Robert Miradique, W. Cooper, E. Lajeunesse, Marie Lowitska etc) are all pseudonyms. Even the advertisements bear his skewed imprint: the restaurant Chez Jourdain entices customers with the words, ‘Where can you see Van Dongen’ – the Flemish painter Kees van ...”

“... lectures about various Iraqi weapons programmes, about the result of past inspections, about the craft and tools of inspection, the rights and duties of inspectors in Iraq and about the history, culture and religions of Iraq’. An Unmovic inspector, he said, should be ‘driving and dynamic – but not angry and aggressive’; ‘ingenious – but not ...”

“... of utter ruin. Branson’s line on Bower is that he got lucky a while back exposing the monstrous Robert Maxwell and is now trying the same trick on other prominent figures in the hope that lightning will strike twice. But Bower doesn’t portray Branson as another Maxwell. He never suggests he is a crook and he is almost admiring of the skill with which he ...”

“... to failure and the posthumous honour of indie renown. The largest exception to the rule, as Robert Kolker and Nathan Abrams show in Kubrick: An Odyssey, owed his escape to a coalescence of luck and preternatural self-confidence.Kubrick is a comprehensive Life. It yields, in orderly procession, almost every fact a scholar or a fan might want; and a fair ...”

“... consonants’ into order ‘with sadistic ease’. This subtle poem implies with kindness and craft what so many writers from working-class backgrounds labour on about: the continuing need for a communal background from which the writer has been isolated by individual intelligence, the need for                      blank printer’s ...”

“... of Opened Ground; his subsequent use of it shows how closely fractious politics and the demands of craft can run together in his work to produce a form of words which sounds final in its simplicity but has had the capacity to take on new meanings as his writing has developed. In the years since North the idea of ‘opening up’ has become a leitmotif in ...”