“... everything else is the same. The first time they met, Gabrielle (or John Marcher) told Louis (May Bartram) the great governing secret of her/his life. She/he was waiting for a ‘strange, rare and terrible thing’ to happen, an event that would spring at its victim ‘like a hidden beast’ and perhaps ‘obliterate’ that person. This is the language ...”

“... as it was on 24 March by Nato, than it recovers its threadbare dignity. Its status in the abstract may even have been enhanced – in some quarters anyhow – by the fact that it was weakened in a single, real instance. But in the former Yugoslavia, a loss of any kind often insinuates itself into the annals of gain, while short-term winners – Kosovo ...”

“... photographs, and what seems in reproduction a surprisingly bad drawing of the poet, but the text may foil anyone whose ‘Larkin’ is the author of the three main volumes of verse – and it is hard to see what other readers the editor could have looked for. Such a reader may finish this enjoyable collection of essays ...”

“... determine exactly what or how much was added to the original version or where any such additions may have been put in. Parker has convinced himself that the sure mark of any added material is that some direct reference is made in it to Pierre as a working poet or novelist. And since, again in his view, all references of this kind only begin to occur about ...”

“... He was born here, he should know; we were born In the wildest desert so generous, where a man may breathe indeed. He said bright Denmark was out of the question: Only dark Africa calls, where he may make himself A paradise away from this, his woven, wet hell. III 24 September 1874 O Hans Andersen, You will have seen ...”

“... is ten thousand feet above sea level: there was snow on the ground when I crossed it on foot in May 1982, on a trek in the Himalayas with a friend. The route took us down the side of a mountain to the resthouse we were aiming for, a single-roomed stone building, maintained by an absent housekeeper. Apart from four bare bedsteads, there was nothing inside ...”

“... heroically honest thing to do is in a socially ‘edited’ world. On that terrible adjective we may pause for a long time. It throws the clearest and coldest beam of its presiding author’s mind, and perhaps her final capital judgment on those cool conventions, those prophylactic artifices, with which, with the best of intentions, every organised society ...”

“... unintended outcome of a Supreme Court ruling exercising jurisdiction over Guantánamo detainees may be that, in the future, capture of terrorism suspects will be foregone in favour of killing them.’ All that advocates of legal rights were going to achieve was the death of suspected terrorists, not their fair treatment. But has Obama’s switch from a ...”

“... at the moment is Beckett’s sanitisation of old age about which, knowing so little of Beckett, I may be hopelessly wrong. But Beckett’s old age is dry, musty, desiccated. Do Beckett’s characters even smell their fingers? Who pisses? How does the woman in Happy Days shit?21 February. When we went to see the Late Rembrandt show the other week I noticed ...”

“... the underground enemies are translated as ‘INKlings’.) In other stories the underground may be moved up to the 16th floor of a supermodern hotel: just once in a while, when you get out at that floor in the middle of the night, you will find yourself in total darkness, there will be a smell of mould, and somewhere down there, at the end of the ...”

“... the crisis-era emergency funding; from the point of view of international economic governance that may prove to be the most clear-cut test yet of the stance of the Trump presidency. A stark illustration of the asymmetrical structure of American world order came in recent months in the use of the dollar-based system of invoicing for international trade to ...”

“... at 40, Baudelaire at 46. If Baudelaire has never quite attained the hipster cachet of Rimbaud, it may be purely a matter of image. (Which is itself already quite modern.) Before Keith Richards, before punk, here is rock and roll animal Arthur Rimbaud with his anti-gravity shock of lightning strike hair. A queer Pan with italicised attitude, Rimbaud gets the ...”

“... produce appropriate outputs towards motor centres. The first response to the sound ‘Hullo’ may be a sharpening of attention and then, if it is repeated, perhaps a pattern of motor activity by the larynx and muscles of the throat that sends the response ‘Yes – is that you, James?’ There are evidently some gaps in the physiological story, but they ...”

“... for two astonishing months, seemed to promise the country reconstruction and renewal. When, in May, the Sri Lankan Armed Forces launched an assault on the northern Jaffna peninsula, which had for two years been almost entirely controlled by the main Tamil militant organisation, the Liberation Tigers of Tamil Eelam (the LTTE), nobody could have foreseen ...”

“... it was, as Barrett put it, ‘an ingenious invention! – a book too small to be read!’ And she may well have felt something of a professional challenge in the struggle to submit to the constraints both of the miniature form and of another’s style. But for one who believed so intensely in poetic individuality, even thus compassionately to connive at ...”