“... and, as Taoiseach, he decided to make public money available for this. The project was taken on by Robert Dudley Edwards from University College Dublin, who promised that a book, one thousand pages long, made up of essays by various experts, would be in print by 1946. The Government released a grant of £1500. Over the next few years Edwards worked with a ...”

“... suffer the loss they were afraid of, yes,Holders of one position, wrong for years.This has the young Auden’s typical combination of doomwatch and kicking energy. The voice of the inevitable is speaking, the voice of evolutionary force, the voice of what he would eventually and notoriously, in the last stanza of ‘Spain’, call History. So it is proper ...”

“... 12 February. A shoddy programme about the conviction of Jonathan King for offences against young men dating back twenty-five years and more. While it features some of the police involved, it manages not to ask the pertinent question: if these 15-year-old boys had been 15-year-old girls and romping round in Rolls-Royces even more famous than those of ...”

“... own incarceration within the English Tripos. Abandoning the task in despair at two in the morning, young Ted goes to bed and dreams that he is visited by a strange figure, half-man and half-fox, ‘just now stepped out of a furnace’ and in terrible agony from the burns that cover its body from head to foot. This enigmatic creature moves towards the desk and ...”

“... at the tomb. I said: “Look. There is something going on.” There were Christians, Muslims, young and old, rich and poor. For the first time, you saw people from all parts of Lebanon praying together. At the same time, a journalist called to say the mukhabarrat’ – the intelligence services – ‘were putting pressure on the television not to show ...”

“... leaders’ aims. It would have shrugged off the emigration of a few hundred thousand disaffected young people, and the deaths and maiming of tens, perhaps hundreds of thousands of Russians, as the necessary price of success. It would have brutally and successfully shown its power to crush what little internal opposition remains. It would have exposed the ...”

“... scope, even though the women of the country had softened in their attitudes, persuaded by handsome young soldiers less grim of demeanour than their compatriots, and having miraculous access, in this embattled mid-Atlantic island, to ample stocks of liquor and gramophone records. Iceland had its own hit parade, not corresponding to those of the homelands. An ...”

“... included paintings by Ernst and poems by the American Modernist Hart Crane, the French Surrealists Robert Desnos and Philippe Soupault and the German Expressionist Georg Trakl (in translations from French and German by Eugene Jolas). A decade later, the last issue was still churning out Work in Progress, now alongside work by Hans Arp, Beckett, Breton, Kafka ...”

“... which for their combination of learning and penetration excel even those of his master, Ernst Robert Curtius – there is nothing said which he was not equally ready to say, mutatis mutandis, about Montale. He studied the poetry of the past on the assumption that in the present there could be great poets too. For Contini history is now and now is ...”

“... and ‘the’, rises to cosmic grandeur. This move towards involving the planets in the young Boland’s encounter with the old woman is nicely ironised by the way in which the poet’s belated rejection of harmonious servitude to English court culture is written in lines which themselves strike an elegantly Elizabethan note: but nothing now can ...”

“... on national assistance.’ Among those Protestants to whom O’Neill failed to get through was the young Ian Paisley, then making a name for himself as an anti-Catholic rabble-rouser. Paisley, a personal friend of District Inspector Nixon, began by denouncing O’Neill as a sell-out and a Lundy. To many, Paisley was a figure of ridicule, but as the political ...”

“... His older twin, Jesse Garon, was stillborn. (There was ugly gossip later that the doctor, William Robert Hunt, might have had a drink; that he might have saved Jesse if he hadn’t been so preoccupied with the surprise appearance of a second child. But the Presleys were satisfied with his work and Dr Hunt received his standard $15 payment from the county.) In ...”

“... school near Blackpool, he showed an aptitude for languages and sport. If not quite an unreflective young professional in the making (a sardonic, watchful temperament was already apparent, Greacen says), he was at least a semi-hearty when, in 1956, he went to Brasenose College, Oxford, to study law. His main aim was to distinguish himself on the rugby ...”

“... Koestler was still in France. By now, his first marriage had come apart and he was living with the young English sculptor Daphne Hardy. She was to be his companion through much of the terrifying episode in his life described in Scum of the Earth: internment as a dangerous alien in the camp of Le Vernet in the French Pyrenees, flight from the advancing Germans ...”

“... could give his compliments a sharper second edge, as for example in ‘To My Honoured Friend Sir Robert Howard, on His Excellent Poems’ (Howard later became his brother-in-law). Discussing Howard’s translation of Book IV of the Aeneid, Dryden says: Elisa’s griefs are so expressed by you, They are too eloquent to have been true. ‘Elisa’, as the ...”