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“... The Thing about Joe Sullivan, probably the most likeable collection by a not always likeable poet, John Ash wrote: ‘In a better world, he would be as widely known and highly praised as Ted Hughes and Seamus Heaney.’ This would be a very strange world, and not necessarily a better one. Fisher has never aspired to the sort ...”

“... and the inviolability of the home were exchanged between the Minister of State and the Prefect, to whom M. de Sérisy pointed out that the major interests of the country sometimes required secret illegalities, crime beginning only when State means were applied to private interests.If ever a man feels the sweetness, the ...”

“... under the floodlights, a penetrating radar giving the bones a voluptuous rebirth.’ There aren’t many skeletons left in Hardwick’s closet. Since 1973, when Robert Lowell published The Dolphin, a series of sonnets based on Hardwick’s letters to him during the breakdown of their marriage, the story of her life has been ...”

“... an ordeal not lightly undertaken. Storms and seasickness were inevitable – passengers often had to be carried ashore. Rival nations’ warships patrolled the main sailing routes, adding the danger of capture to the perils of the sea. But for most travellers, the worst part was the tedium. Despite this, many American and ...”

“... Woe​ to royal daughters over the centuries: from the moment of their birth, they were seen as assets to be traded on the international marriage market for the benefit of their families. The bidding for such unions began early, often when the girls were still infants; there would likely be a series of explorations, more or less serious, before one intricate set of negotiations made it to completion ...”

“... are of interest, but what is the point of unrolling them alphabetically as something purporting to be a dictionary? Abbott opens, and Zangwill closes, yet the book is not a work of reference. It is an anthology. A lazy piece of work, or of relaxation, and not just because its compiler has declined the effort of an imaginative ordering and has instead fallen ...”

“... Latin and Greek by gaslight and riding a goat cart in Central Park’ before going off to Harvard, where his classmates included John Reed, T.S. Eliot and Conrad Aiken. From birth to death, Fortune – in the form of knowing nearly everyone ...”

“... he disdained. In the words of David Grann, whose compelling new book, The Lost City of Z, tries to make sense of the man and his last mission, Fawcett ‘ventured into blank spots on the map with little more than a machete, a compass and an almost divine sense of purpose’. He was an imposing figure, tall, lean tending ...”

“... vote. As on numerous other matters, the constitution is frustratingly opaque when it comes to details. Most people think they can recognise treason and bribery when they see them, but what constitutes a high crime or a misdemeanour? In the Federalist Papers, Alexander Hamilton described impeachment as a political ...”

“... the air, for your own poor body will go there some day.’ That was the sort of wisdom that used to come with free school milk at my Scottish primary school. I remember the blizzard around the classroom the day Mrs Wallace said it to me, a snow-scene dense enough to make the end of ...”

“... Anyone presuming to review works of modern literary theory must expect to be depressed by an encounter with large quantities of deformed prose. The great ones began it, and aspiring theorists usually carry their heads grotesquely to one side in emulation of these models ...”

“... of Jacques Tourneur’s Cat People, admired Penman’s review so much that he invited him over to Los Angeles to talk product. Penman in California was truly the vision of a man who fell to earth, a pale alien in an X Files landscape. Wasn’t that ...”

“... the museum after its redesign by the Japanese architect Yoshio Taniguchi. In the New Yorker John Updike likened its presence to ‘an invisible cathedral’, but it is closer to an abstract palace. The main access is now nearer Sixth than Fifth Avenue, and you enter from either 53rd ...”

“... knew Rochester rather better than we or any other of the commentators on his life may be said to have done. In the months that followed his death she was to see her uncle become vastly famous, not as Marvell’s ‘best satirist and in the right vein’ or Shaftesbury’s ‘worthy’, but as a rake of the most ...”

“... Cubism, less about Iberian sculpture, and nothing at all about the title’s supposed reference to a brothel in Barcelona; I am not sure I even knew what a brothel was. All I knew was that this was a great masterpiece by the greatest artist of our time, and I responded with appropriate awe and admiration. I had grown up with a tastefully framed reproduction ...”