“... shell had cracked.’ Colin Saville makes his break, turning like Paul Morel towards the light of the city on the hill. He’s done with school-mastering. ‘You haven’t any lodgings or anything,’ his lachrymose mother tells him as he prepares to catch the train to London. ‘I don’t need lodgings,’ Saville replies, ‘I can always sleep on ...”

“... turf, grounded in the undergrowth of a forest. These works often use materials that have come to light in the place itself – leaves, rubbed red stones, dry sticks, thorns, the dark fluid from mushroom gills, stones picked from scree, blocks of snow and slivers of ice, earth, deer-dung, scrap iron, fern fronds, spruce thinnings and off-cuts. In this, the ...”

“... two years we have witnessed the unforeseen rise of Bernie Sanders (75), Jeremy Corbyn (68) and Donald Trump (71), the oldest man ever to become president. These men have lurked on the margins of public life for decades, and a stockpile of images and stories has accumulated around them. Both Corbyn and Sanders have an impressive archive, appearing in ...”

“... let’s keep that fire going.’ One Davidian, Graeme Craddock, remembered hearing someone say, ‘Light the fire,’ followed by someone else objecting, before the order was repeated. But this wasn’t necessarily an act of mass suicide, even if many of the Davidians believed that dying in a battle against Babylon would ‘translate’ them to a higher form ...”

“... and Hughes, but of Olson and Williams, Snyder and Bly. I was freed up,’ he says, much as Donald Davie was freed up by his own move to California. (Heaney praises Essex Poems, begun before Davie left Britain, but published, and perhaps completed, afterwards.) To live in America meant acquiring un-English ways to read. Heaney met Czeslaw Milosz, along ...”

“... derives its artistic weight, while the ambition of a work such as Troilus is its undoing. A light-music element is found throughout Walton’s oeuvre, not only in Troilus (Pandarus’s scene at the start of Act Two is one instance) and, less surprisingly, in the one-act comedy of The Bear (Smirnov’s song, ‘Madame, je vous prie’), but even in the ...”

“... atmosphere by a detonation, to record seismic movements caused by nuclear explosions, to detect light flashes reflected off the dark side of the moon, and to observe blast-induced ‘dimples’ in the ionosphere. Whenever possible, the US listens in on the electronic communications and conversations of nuclear scientists and officials in target ...”

“... in the middle of a treeless field. The ripe grass rippled, though there was no wind, and the light, as he later remembered, ‘was everywhere’, though there was no sun to be seen. Seeing himself in the centre of a circle of children, all of them singing and playing ‘Ring a Ring o’ Roses’, Duncan understood that he was ‘it’: ‘the Chosen One ...”

“... It is appropriate, for his artist wife, that several of these poems should celebrate the light (and odd that one of the finest, ‘Writing with Light’, should not have been included): not only all the variations of sunlight, but also the ‘lovely, erotic flame of the candlelight’, and the ‘leaf-...”

“... and findings, and point to intense pressure for results from frustrated military officers. In the light of these accounts, Abu Ghraib does seem to have been exceptional in its vulnerability to mortar attack, its radically overcrowded conditions, its low morale and obscure command structure, lack of coherent record-keeping and prisoner identification, and for ...”

“... by a consortium of friends, business associates and family, including Robert’s younger brother Donald, who was lent £1700 by his bankrupt elder brother to join in the deal. One limited company had gone bust but, as so often, another with a similar name sprung up in its place, and employed the ‘indefatigable’ (but bankrupt) entrepreneur at £7 a ...”

“... whether there is any in yet another life of Chaucer or Cervantes when no new facts have come to light to alter the picture. A better idea might be to follow the lead of Hugh Kenner, as Donald Howard is now doing, writing an account not of Chaucer but of the Chaucer era, ‘an X-ray moving picture of how our epoch was ...”

“... to pull the Party towards the kind of street politics which the douce and amiable leadership of Donald Dewar, the shadow Scottish Secretary of State, recoils from. A fight may be in the offing. On the other hand, if the next leader of the party is to be – as now seems the case – John Smith, that would set the seal on the dominance of Scots in the Labour ...”

“... In the unbearable holiday of lockdown, I spent a lot of time by the pond, sitting in the dappled light, letting the burble of the artificial stream work its emollient voodoo, hankering to cast a line into fast water. I should have been fishing; instead, I watched the fish in their languid patrol of the pond’s rocky edges. They glide, they hover, they dart ...”

“... voices. In ‘January’, one asks: ‘Mommy what’s this fork doing?/What?/It’s being Donald Duck.’ Domestic conversation blends into a kind of surrealism whose hectic music mimics the rhythms of family life. Voices interweave. ‘Edmund. Edmund. Edmund. Maaah. Lodle lodle lodle.’ Many of the poems reflect on the ‘radical bodily change’ of ...”