“... comments on current events on Twitter in all caps, including on the threat posed to ‘our beloved Donald’ by communists. Vargas Llosa recently recalled meeting her in her homein an elegant neighbourhood in a house filled with plastic flowers where there is a photograph – that occupies an entire wall – of the Colonel Carlos Castillo Armas and a votive ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... ephemeral. Ammons listens to syllables as though he were diagnosing the workings of matter. ‘Sir Thomas Browne uses the word as “fictile vessels”, meaning clay,’ he wrote to a friend in 1954, ‘very interesting word; the first syllable hard, the second oozing over into a thin oilyness.’ This slippage from solid to liquid is translated into analogous ...”

“... Gurrelieder remained popular, Schoenberg’s serialist pieces were reviled by the mainstream. Sir Thomas Beecham, when asked whether he had conducted Schoenberg, joked tastelessly that no, he hadn’t, but he’d trodden in some once. For audiences used to the more whistleable modernisms of Britten or Shostakovitch, Schoenberg’s series were too ...”

“... took charge of the psychoanalytic movement. Jones saw himself in the same relationship to Freud as Thomas Huxley had been to Darwin; both he and Huxley, Jones wrote, were ‘bonny fighters’. Huxley described himself as ‘Darwin’s bulldog’ and Maddox’s title refers to Jones as ‘Freud’s wizard’, but he was more commonly known as ‘Freud’s ...”

“... after white supremacists held their ‘Unite the Right’ rally in Charlottesville, Virginia, Donald Trump’s (then) chief of staff, John Kelly, went on Fox News and delivered a history lesson. ‘The lack of an ability to compromise led to the Civil War,’ he said. ‘Men and women of good faith on both sides made their stand where their conscience had ...”

“... most of all, an account that makes you want to read him. His prose only intermittently wears Thomas Browne and Robert Burton and Thomas Fuller and Tristram Shandy on its sleeve. At other times it has a tart poeticism: ‘He is boy-rid, sick of perpetual boy.’ Or exhibits that proto-Dickensian habit of comic ...”

“... to London, Magee played Mr Slocum in that same first production of All That Fall, directed by Donald McWhinnie, in which Jack MacGowran had taken part. It was hearing this voice faintly in France through the ether as broadcast on the BBC Third Programme in December 1957 – reading an extract from Molloy and From an Abandoned Work, also directed by ...”

“... that responded early, such as South Korea and Taiwan, could have been adapted and implemented. But Donald Trump and Boris Johnson chose instead to claim immunity. ‘I think it’s going to work out fine,’ Trump announced on 19 February. On 3 March, the day the UK’s Scientific Advisory Group for Emergencies warned against shaking hands, Johnson boasted ...”

“... 5000 to 1 pales in comparison with the odds you would have got in 2008 on a future world in which Donald Trump was president, Theresa May was prime minister, Britain had voted to leave the European Union, and Jeremy Corbyn was leader of the Labour Party – which to many close observers of Labour politics is actually the least likely thing on that list. The ...”

“... constraints, to emerge. But one can’t generalise. Some émigrés are obsessed by the fatherland: Donald Davie goes transatlantic and promptly writes The Shires. Others adapt without fuss: Prince Charles, when traversing North America last year, announced his allegiance to the Reflective Sublime. ‘I rather feel,’ he declared, ‘that deep in the soul of ...”

“... much part of the movement as Ed Dorn, Robert Creeley or Kenneth Koch. With his Essex Poems, even Donald Davie, the very type of the English conservative poet-critic, appeared to have capitulated to ‘American’ Modernism, just as the more recent poems of Charles Tomlinson seemed touched by the dotty magniloquence of Charles Olson’s ‘Projective ...”

“... and religious environments, and were conceived as both summations of and short cuts to learning. Thomas of Ireland’s Manipulus Florum (‘Handful of Flowers’) was compiled in Paris around 1306. It lists quotations under topical headings such as ‘superbia’ (pride) and ‘perseverantia’ (perseverance). Thomas’s ...”

“... work was David Chalmers’s The Conscious Mind (1996): ‘Consciousness is the biggest mystery.’ Thomas Huxley wrote, 140 years ago: We class sensations along with emotions and volitions and thoughts, under the common head of states of consciousness. But what consciousness is, we know not, and how it is that anything so remarkable as a state of ...”

“... had Persian names; two later children, born to his Persian wife, Sima, were called Maria and Thomas.) Between 1925 and 1940, he was really all over the place – not that that couldn’t be said about the time before and much of the time after as well. He came and went between Rapallo and England, where he took a job as a music critic; he did good ...”