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“... a first-rate American poetess. She really is good. Certainly one of the best female poets I ever read, and a damn sight better than the run of good male. Her main enthusiasm at present is me, and she thinks my verses are as good as I think they are and has accordingly and efficiently dispatched about twenty five to various immensely paying American ...”

“... Black Hornet, Moth, The Long Legged Fly. Sallis is a fastidious man, intelligent and widely read (genre fiction, poetry, the Modernist canon). There’s nothing slapdash or merely strategic about his work. This, after all, is someone prepared to take years to contrive a proper translation of Raymond Queneau’s complex artifice, Saint Glinglin. So if ...”

“... in formation and resistant to external view. As an episodic (non-dues-paying) member, I have now read, in addition to the biography, the full-length critical studies by David Mikics and James Naremore, watched Jan Harlan’s excellent documentary, Stanley Kubrick: A Life in Pictures, and explored every entry in The Stanley Kubrick Archives edited by Alison ...”

“... brother of someone so famous and well-loved, but Cecil was convinced he’d been overlooked: Leonard Woolf noted the streak of ‘fanatical intolerance’ nourished by a ‘grudge against the universe, the world and you in particular’. Beginning as a Fabian socialist under the mentorship of Hubert Bland, Cecil came out in favour of the Boer War and ...”

“... against blasphemy. The introductory chapter of Blasphemy, by the great American legal scholar Leonard Levy, covers ‘the Jewish trial of Jesus’; it is followed in close succession, in Levy’s account, by the Christian invention of the concept of heresy and the persecution of the Socinian and Arminian heretics and later of the Ranters, Antinomians and ...”

“... performing in 1815, as his hearing further deteriorated. His work became more difficult, harder to read. But he remained an engaged and worldly businessman, who managed to sell the score of the Missa Solemnis to three different publishers at once (the triple-dating only came to light when two of the publishers met at a trade fair in Leipzig). Moreover, if his ...”

“... his credit) he stumbles several times when he has to broadcast this absurdity. 4 April. Asked to read The Good Companions for a possible production I find I can only get as far as the end of Act I. It’s interesting, though, in that it’s Priestley on one of his favourite themes, that of escape and escape from the North particularly. Act I, Scene I ends ...”

“... based on ‘modes of limited transposition’ and ‘non-retrogradable rhythms’ (rhythms that read the same way backwards and forwards, like palindromes): their purpose was to create a sense of atemporality, suggestive of theological timelessness. ‘The truths I express, the truths of the Faith,’ he said, were ‘always rooted in a radiant, unchanging ...”

“... are holding 155. They cannot lie down. They are pressured to sign documents in English they cannot read. The one source of running water in the cell is the single open toilet, where one defecates in the crowd.*The head of an anti-immigrant group, the Federation for American Immigration Reform, says the administration ‘doesn’t want the detention experience ...”

“... the fire he felt. Of all the smelts I ever smelt, I never smelt a smelt like that smelt smelt. Leonard (Chico), Adolph (Harpo), Julius (Groucho), Herbert (Zeppo) and Milton (Gummo): Groucho was a middle child, if you want to make anything of it. He was the first to succeed, at the age of 15, with a vestigial talent for singing, but a miasma of rotten luck ...”

“... and interrogation was sent up to the assize court and – for the better part of two centuries – read out to the jury. It was against this that the accused had to do the best he could without legal assistance. It was during the 18th century that judges began to insist on oral testimony from those Crown witnesses who were available; but it was not until ...”

“... of the photographs here: next to the clustered roof lights of the Zalman Aranne Library in Israel, Leonard Cohen tells us that ‘there is a crack, a crack, in everything, that’s how the light gets in’; underneath an image of the bluntly Expressionist Luckenwalde Hat Factory by Erich Mendelsohn, Nick Cave sings that ‘out of sorrow entire worlds have been ...”

“... done’. But he couldn’t be bothered with The Ambassadors, and for his own part preferred to be read by the multitude who shared this view; and so did Wells. The differences between, say, The Golden Bowl and anything Wells would have wanted to write are clear enough. As Wells expressed it, ‘James begins by taking it for granted that a novel is a work of ...”

“... for those who spied on or informed against him as a student in East Berlin in 1980, can be read as an autobiographical coda. What could easily have been a formulaic inquest becomes, as memory is startled into life by disturbing encounters, the most self-questioning and humane of his writings. Historically, Garton Ash belongs to the last levy of the ...”

“... he gave evidence to the audit committee seven years later, the convener, the Labour MSP Richard Leonard, suggested to McColl that the announcement of Ferguson’s as the preferred bidder ‘must have strengthened your hand in any negotiations that were taking place’. McColl disagreed: subsequent negotiations had taken longer than he had expected – they ...”