“... About Modern Art, Sylvester tells how Britain in the 1950s had, as he saw it, to be saved from John Berger (both men had stints as art critic for the New Statesman) whose ‘rhetorical skills and . . . performing skills on TV won considerable support, financial as well as moral, for inferior artists.’Berger had a Ruskinian interest in the social context ...”

“... the bewildering complexity of the Iran-Contra affair, and got gates galore. Since Oliver North and John Poindexter had communicated their fell designs through a system called the Prof computer, and since the thing hinged so much on transfers of hot and dirty money, I myself proudly came up with ‘Profligate’ which, though it won me no prizes, did get ...”

“... annual stipend so he could concentrate on his poetry, only to commit suicide two years later; to John Quinn, a lawyer and collector to whom T.S. Eliot gave the manuscript of The Waste Land; to James Laughlin, founder and editor of New Directions (or Nude Erections as Pound liked to call it); to Alice Corbin Henderson of Poetry; to Scofield Thayer and James ...”

“... New Ways to Kill Your Mother. Of Hart Crane’s suicide he writes: ‘He walked on deck … took off his coat, folded it neatly over the railing (not dropping it on deck) … then suddenly he vaulted over the railing and jumped into the sea.’ This was in 1932. At Calverley on the outskirts of Leeds seven years previously my grandfather folded his ...”

“... on the kindness of a series of characters who, in the words of his letters of recommendation, took ‘a chance’ on him despite his ‘lousy marks’, because he was ‘a natural’. For spring break in his junior year he flew to the Bahamas, despite having only a fraction of an $89 tax refund left to spend. On the beach he met a blonde, Neilia ...”

“... invited him back to their hotel for ‘a little private party’. Beg declined, so the players took him anyway – according to Beg – dislocating one of his arms in the process. At the hotel, Beg recounted later, the cricketers doused him with water and forced him to swig some whisky. Not until a team of Pakistani cricketers heard about Beg’s ordeal ...”

“... enter Gaza to 34 – flour but not yeast, sugar but not coffee or tea. (‘Pasta,’ a querulous John Kerry asked senior Israeli officials after visiting Gaza, ‘what’s wrong with pasta?’) The shortages were biting, particularly after Israel destroyed or damaged tens of thousands of homes, schools and government buildings in its 22-day campaign last ...”

“... friend: ‘The spirits of my African ancestors were there. I could feel them and they really took hold of me . . . I could see them moving about . . . Yes, it was deep, man . . . I just let the spirits take hold of me . . . But you know, I expect people to respect me. What I do demands so much of me that they must respect what I do.’ It turns ...”

“... via the Egyptian capital of Alexandria and Syrian Antioch. Back in her home town she took up with another rising political star, Justinian, the nephew and adopted son of the then emperor, Justin. This time the pair did marry, but only after Justin’s disapproving wife had died and the elderly emperor was persuaded to change the law to allow ...”

“... I avoid all worldly fun. Many photographs of the visionary follow, taken by her Polish father. John K. Sagatis, who died, the book alleges, as a result of the wanton neglect of an NHS hospital. These photographs of an aspiring saint are fascinating: reproduced in the degraded colour of multiple xeroxing, they turn Sister Marie into a kind of performance ...”

“... for Jones seems the weakest: it is advanced by Jones’s admirers, not by the poet himself, who took no interest in the question, having other fish to fry; and unlike most modernists, Jones had no patience with prosody. The claim for Bunting is not contested, and seems incontestable. As for MacDiarmid, he certainly made the claim for himself, loudly. But as ...”

“... recorded incidents of terrorism increased fourfold: out of 6,714 such incidents no less than 5,034 took place in Western Europe, Latin America and the Middle East (in that order). Only 62 occurred in the USSR and Eastern Europe; most of these involved attempts to escape – for example, by hijacking aircraft. These attempts are not regarded in the USSR as ...”

“... Middle-march. It is no use Gordon Haight’s denying that George Eliot meant to satirise Pattison: John Sparrow has pointed out that in that case it is odd that George Eliot, who was well acquainted with Pattison and his much younger wife, should have chosen to call the author of the Key to All Mythologies by the name of a 16th-century French scholar whose ...”

“... writing as an adult male about his Michigan girlhood and the path a mutated gene took through three generations before reaching him. These two books suggest an inventive writer committed to finding a new structure and voice for each story he tells. That such a writer would then publish a semi-autobiographical coming of age story, following ...”

“... a go at closing down the combination room in which the plots against him were hatched. The fellows took their master first to the college visitor (the Bishop of Ely, who was supposed to arbitrate in these kinds of dispute) and then repeatedly to court. His more colourful biographers dwell on other scandals too: when a gun was discharged into the study of the ...”