“... true. ‘Pastime with good company: but where’s the company now? It’s cringing against the wall.’ The recurrence of Henry’s song goes along with some artful thoughts about the relationship between manuscript poetry and the relatively new medium of print. Ballads about the king and Anne are printed, and the king insists that their author should be ...”

“... the infamous, often unsung verse suggesting that all property is theft: There was a big high wall there that tried to stop me; Sign was painted, it said private property; But on the back side it didn’t say nothing; This land was made for you and me. And so an angry song of protest and a hymn to trespass became part of a celebration of the American ...”

“... cohort of young historians of the Soviet Union trained at Columbia in the 1990s who, influenced by Stephen Kotkin, first brought Foucault to Soviet history. Psychologists, specialists in forensic medicine and statisticians – all those in Russia who studied the phenomenon of suicide in the first decade of the 20th century – complained of the lack of state ...”

“... important and when a college or livery company does feel the need to keep the line of faces on the wall up to date, additions look sheepish, like members of a wedding party not used to their morning-coats. Funnel points out that contemporary press accounts of Millais stress his manliness. He dressed (and hunted and fished) like a gentleman. He was a ...”

“... on the walls was a large picture, exquisitely painted by Spagnoletto,’ of the martyrdom of St Stephen. The Spanish school evoked the rack, the rapier, the ruff, the spiral ebony chair-leg and the fainting nun, and a world that was now sufficiently distant or in decline (in The Antiquary it is the invasion of Bonaparte, not the Jacobites, for which beacons ...”

“... who seem determined to repeal the New Deal; the anti-immigrant extremists Peter Brimelow and Stephen Miller; climate change deniers; adherents of gun culture; and Donald Trump’s former attorney general William Barr, who has blamed increased toleration of gay men and lesbians for the supposed moral decay of Western civilisation (channelling Pat ...”

“... a suit. He doesn’t mention his later fixation with the predatory, greed- is-good Gordon Gekko in Wall Street, but on a recent podcast his sister suggested it was the inspiration for his shellacked-back hair. Newsom says baseball got him into Santa Clara University – he doesn’t say that, as the New York Times reported, his application was probably pushed ...”

“... poets, Clare’s doesn’t describe his main employment. Robert Burns was the Ploughman Poet; Stephen Duck, the Thresher Poet. We have at least three Shoemaker/Cobbler Poets: John Askham, John Gregory and Robert Bloomfield, whom Clare regarded as ‘the first of Rural Bards’. It seems unjust that Clare should be denied a proper job when he worked so ...”

“... units are warm places,’ a social worker told me:They have carpets and drawings on the wall. The staff wear their own clothes and are not afraid to give new arrivals a hug. Polmont is grey and clinical. He would have been met and searched by uniformed officers … But it would have been walking into the wing that scared him most: the rows of ...”

“... the bend in the river, a shape that gives purpose to an inadequately defined horizon. On the wall of the pub is a map of the area from the pre-Dome period: a Guide to the Thames (by Catamaran Cruises). This improved landscape cuts directly from the Royal Naval College to the Thames Barrier, so that the peninsula is not merely occulted, it doesn’t ...”

“... zebra on a wooden plinth. Like something out of place and menacing, sticking its head through the wall in an early Lucian Freud painting. The questing sociologist has an agenda. She is our nominated surrogate in occupied territory. And she is persistent. She comes back until the required witnesses can be persuaded to share a drink and a stroll, to confess in ...”

“... Middle East, reforming the criminal justice system, overseeing the building of the Mexican border wall, diplomacy with China, the 2020 re-election campaign and the creation of an Office of American Innovation dedicated to entirely revamping the way the government works. His efforts at procurement have been disastrous, and there is a continuing nationwide ...”

“... own, he wasn’t much of a teacher, but was a delightful presence. One of his students that term, Stephen Yenser, became not only a lifelong friend but one of Merrill’s very best readers, and co-editor, with J.D. McClatchy, of an excellent though overlong 2008 Selected Poems. Reading Merrill at length can feel like being trapped in endless rooms full of ...”

“... get the idea.’ You get the idea. In a play this would count as breaking the fourth wall, but such effects are much more powerful in the theatre, where three walls have actually been provided. In fiction any impression of solidity is a sandcastle built jointly by writer and reader, easily kicked over by either party. Wilful underminings are ...”

“... were brought up in Burlingame, a suburb which she skewered in her novel The Road through the Wall (1948), peopling it with near indistinguishable snobs and bullies. The first book, she would tell her own children, is your revenge on your parents: once it’s out of your system you can get on with the real writing. When Jackson was a teenager, they moved ...”