“... morning Isaiah Berlin and Stephen Spender) and wants to photograph me outside. ‘Outside’ means that eventually I find myself perched up a tree in Hyde Park. Avedon’s assistants bustle round with lights, Avedon himself scarcely bothering to look through the lens, just enquiring from time to time where the edge of the frame is. He explains he wants ...”

“... fully recognises the relation between valuable products (grain, coal, timber, manufactures) and means of transportation. He makes us feel the nature of the road, at times appealing to the reader’s sensual imagination, even to the fascination of discomfort. ‘From this town of Guilford, the road to Farnham is very remarkable, for it runs along west from ...”

“... where he spent the first 19 years of his life: a life whose adventures are mainly, though by no means solely, intellectual and geistig. Among his grandfather’s guests at Redmond Manor he met Henry Raeburn, who painted Sir Francis Marbot (1803, now at the Tate) and Lady Catherine (1804, Edinburgh, National Gallery of Scotland); William Turner and Sir ...”

“... little emerges by way of significant departure: Matthews provides a more lively-looking syntax by means of a rapid sprinkling of minor stops, and generally by punctuating a little more freely. Compare the transcriptions of the entry for 5 January 1666 – first, the version by Bright in Wheatley’s edition: 5th. I with my Lord Bruncker and Mrs Williams by ...”

“... clubs and coffee-houses of London’s blossoming West End, and the perfect clownish counterfoil to David Garrick’s smouldering tragic hero. In his heyday in the 1760s, a summer season at the Haymarket theatre earned his company up to £5000, which may be multiplied a hundredfold for its value today. He had a townhouse on Suffolk Street, round the corner from ...”

“... as educated non-Jews was the precondition of joining modern civilisation, and the most immediate means of desegregation. However, the passion of emancipated Jews for the national language and culture of the gentile countries in which they lived was all the more intense, because in so many cases they were not joining, as it were, long-established clubs but ...”

“... Nixon would never have been able to achieve the ‘New Majority’ he dreamed of. But to do so by means of economic concessions – previously the only way politicians imagined working-class voters might be wooed – would threaten his business constituency. So Nixon ‘stood the problem on its head’, as Cowie says in Nixon’s Class Struggle (2002), ‘by ...”

“... where the lobotomy on Betsy was carried out but identifies the doctor responsible as Marcel David. This authorises her, with an exaggeration most will forgive, to link his name with Freeman’s as two mobile men immobilising women who made the mistake of not knowing their place.In the book’s most startling passage Yon breaks off her researches and ...”

“... book, ‘backed by a reference to an interview with someone whose credibility we have no means of assessing.’ When a second edition came out in 1982, he returned with even more pepper, lamenting Ellmann’s gullible readiness to accept what Kenner called ‘the Irish Fact’, meaning ‘anything they tell you in Ireland’. Kenner took Ellmann’s ...”

“... six-foot or even seven-foot accentual lines. One such poem is called ‘What I will pay’ (he means, for artistic mastery) and what Gurney will pay is unceasing work, and emulation of ‘Beethoven, Bach, Jonson’, all so that he may ‘write fair on strict thought-pages’. The harvest of this violence, the reward for which this price was paid, would ...”

“... never saw such a force as theirs was’; and even later Sir Francis Drake in the Revenge was by no means sure that the danger had passed. Parma, with a powerful army, was still there in the Spanish Netherlands, and with a change of wind the Armada might still come back and carry him over to Kent – a battered, diminished, but still well-supplied Armada ...”

“... matrix through which East and South see themselves. A strong but representative book like David Dabyeen’s Coolie Odyssey* will go back to The Tempest, Blake and, most evidently, Homer in an effort to come to terms with colonialism. And Derek Walcott has for some years now read ‘Iliads and Odysseys’ (Chatwin’s phrase), Clampitt’s ‘middle of ...”

“... as for Who’s Who) in positions of power in publishing-houses; our true literary talents – David Jones, Basil Bunting, Charles Tomlinson and Geoffrey Hill – not forming a group, as they should, and in any case not read; and the food on British railways simply terrible (page 238: ‘Have you travelled on a British Railway? Gagged on its unthinkable ...”

“... have gone so far as to theorise into a whole new mode of production, and which is celebrated in David Lindsay’s detective story, An Absence of Light, a product of American mass culture, in the following terms: The age of the personal computer had brought about a sea-change in the private investigation and intelligence business. Now anyone who could ...”