“... found cocoons huddled in the slits of his Man with a Sheep, Picasso said that at Vauvenargues one day he had felt a wasps’ nest between the sheep’s legs; nothing more natural: animals lurking in the animal. Picasso always wanted the statue to be accessible to everyone, so that the children could play with it and the dogs piss on it. Roland Penrose – a ...”

“... never been on a stronger financial footing, is a master class in entitlement. It was filmed the day after three members of its finance and audit committee had resigned because they didn’t have access to the accounts. Brought in by the party’s then treasurer, Douglas Chapman, to find out what was going on, they only ...”

“... that ‘in the early chapters of their autobiographies, Coleridge, Hardy, Yeats, Sassoon, Graves, Day Lewis, Spender and MacNeice have a good deal to say about the external circumstances of their family lives, but little about their internal or “writerly” lives.’ That is true, though some of these poets have left us evidence of their methods of ...”

“... Odyssey with its European and African ordeals, the poem’s concluding books return to present-day St Lucia. The narrator, relieved of his ‘wrong love’ for the mysterious Greek woman, dismantles his Homeric metaphor and releases his characters:    There, in her head of ebony, there was no real need for the historian’s remorse, nor for ...”

“... restaurateurs, gamblers and other essential personnel ready to set up the whole town in a day at the current furthest extent of the railroad. Whereupon life, death, drinking, whoring, gambling, fighting and doubtless a little quiet poetic contemplation went on until the railroad tracks had been laid beyond a certain outer limit, when the whole kit and ...”

“... and the manic-depressive psychology of speculative investment, were there from the first day. We know that cast all too well. It didn’t take the Northern Rock affair to show that sober gents with much to lose can take leave of their senses. That was already plain by the 1690s. Douglas Watt’s ...”

“... it discusses and how it relates to subsequent cultural history. The papers came out the next day all more or less saying the same thing: ‘Mucky Play for Bradford’.17 May. Sitting outside a café in Regent’s Park Road, A. and I see a transvestite striding up the street with a mane of henna’d hair, short skirt and long skinny legs. It’s the legs ...”

“... in the early 1960s, seems strangely vieux jeu today. No one cares. Yet it was effective in its day. Harold Macmillan had an ear for the rhetoric of opposition. He and Sir Harold Wilson have always been on cordial terms. They are, seen in relation to one aspect of politics, birds of a feather. They have something of the same capacity for wit, style and ...”

“... Do you forget things? I do, more and more. My ailing, failing memory was sorely tested the other day. ‘Do you remember who won the Grand National?’ I was asked. Of course I did. It was the most exciting race for years, won right at the post by ... Then came the blank. I’d sat and watched the race, goddam it, but the winner still eluded me, just as it had at the time ...”

“... historically. Certainly, if this book really is, as its blurb claims, ‘set to influence present-day arguments about devolution, unionism and nationalism in Britain and Ireland’, it isn’t at all obvious in which direction it hopes its influence will tend. I doubt that many politicians or constitutional theorists will get as far as the end of its unwieldy ...”

“... in the middle. Then there’s the ‘cameo life-story pendant’, the Memphis newspapers from the day of Presley’s death, and so on, and on – the list is not endless, but it does fill 14 pages. Elvisly Yours additionally tries to keep its readers abreast of whatever Elvis News there can possibly be, four years after his death. For the British ...”

“... is that enchanting mistress Ugliness. With her I will live and what a riot we shall have. Not a day shall pass without a fresh horror. Prometheus leaves his rock to cohabit with the Furies. Jack Yeats’s judgments are better-worded than most attacks on the innovative experiments of early Modernist poetry, but they make the same charges that would be ...”

“... the world of a dangerous queen. In the mythography of Cleopatra, from Antiquity to the present day, the snake is not just the means of her death. It is also her defining feature, her emblem. If you want to understand Cleopatra, her power and her danger, you must first understand her snake. Paintings and visual images show the emblematic quality of ...”

“... Fergusson’ want to discuss Fergusson’s ‘Elegy, on the Death of Scots Music’. Douglas Dunn tells us that ‘spirited elegy, of a kind that trades more on celebration than mourning, is characteristic of the male Scottish mind.’ It takes a while to recover from the massiveness of that statement, and its inappropriateness to, say, Robin ...”

“... mood of Britain more generally – but I look back on that time fondly. A bright winter’s day, the journey south across the Thames on the top deck of a number 4 bus, the walk along Lower Marsh towards the great naval guns at the museum’s entrance. The afternoon would be darkening on our way back and fairy lights would light the little trains in Ian ...”