“... embarrassment, one which verges on a form of psychological or ideological crisis. To nationalise major financial institutions would mean that the Anglo-Saxon model of capitalism had failed. The level of state intervention in the US and UK at this moment is comparable to that of wartime. We have in effect had to declare war to get us out of the hole created ...”

“... of the pro-Russian Donbas industrial region was initially named after a Welsh entrepreneur called John Hughes, who set up an iron-smelting works there in the 1870s (Hughesovka gradually mutating into Yuzovka), attracting Greeks, Tatars, Serbs, Bulgarians, Poles, Jews and Russians to work there (Nikita Khrushchev and Leonid Brezhnev moved to the region with ...”

“... the Asquith government. Again and again, Dyer convicts himself out of his own mouth. As his friend Major General Nigel Woodyatt later told him, ‘he was bound to get the worst of it; not so much for what he had done, but for what he had said.’ As Nigel Collett declares in The Butcher of Amritsar (2005), his magisterial Life of Dyer, it’s difficult to ...”

“... campaigns: men and women told their stories to change opinion and rouse the public to reject a major source of economic profit. Think, too, of what has happened since Proust wrote the amazing erotic scene between Jupien and the Baron de Charlus. Proust’s metaphors of the bumblebee and the orchid, following on from an allusion to birds fluffing up their ...”

“... conservatives.In the swing state of Pennsylvania (the fifth most populous in the country), John Fetterman, a left-leaning Democrat and a strong supporter of marijuana legalisation and criminal justice reform, defeated a Trump-backed candidate, Mehmet Oz, by 4.6 percentage points, outperforming Biden’s result in the state in 2020; the Democratic ...”

“... he negotiated a contract with Bernard Lintot (who was hoping to buy himself a poet who could rival John Dryden in merit and popularity) for a translation of Homer. This was probably the best deal ever struck by an English poet. The fee for the copyright combined with income from the sale of subscription copies of the Iliad made Pope around £5000. That was an ...”

“... windows are designed to reduce traffic noise – deceptively residential, Delancey Street is a major through road connecting Camden to Central, with two bus routes running along it all days of the week.This is closer in tone to a Pevsner guide than to psychogeography of the Iain Sinclair school.Waidner seems to be revisiting the distinction made by Iris ...”

“... but still dramatic falls have been taking place in other states of the former Soviet Union). John Lloyd intends no irony in his title, but his book covers a time when Russians have abandoned birth in a big way. A new Russia may be in the process of being born, but new Russians are not. Far more serious than the refusal to reproduce is the collapse in ...”

“... which covers the years 1912 to 1922, the years of The Rainbow (1915), Women in Love (1921), many major stories, the travel books, Twilight in Italy (1916) and Sea and Sardinia (1921), and just misses his superb book of nature poems, Birds, Beasts and Flowers (1923), shows us both great daring and great achievement. ‘Great’ is silly: to oppose his ...”

“... are doing so not in journals like this one, or in the academy, but at the marketing meetings of major publishing houses, where bottomline logic demands a new literary ‘movement’ every five years or so – and, more important, a new market for that literature. It’s this situation that seems to account for the fact that the nearer one comes to a ...”

“... small yet reliable magazine Antichrist. This Ravelston – some composite of Sir Richard Rees and John Middleton Murry – was a hedonistic yet guilt-ridden dilettante, good in a pinch, and soft on poets, but too easily embarrassed by brute exigence. Saul Bellow – who has already shown a vulnerability to exigent poets in his wonderful Humboldt’s Gift ...”

“... since before the First World War. The epithet ‘triumphant’ in the title of the new volume of John Richardson’s magnum opus has a brash, swaggering ring: fittingly so. This is the tale of an extremely rich and famous man who came pretty near to doing whatever he wanted. The Picasso of the 1920s was physically strong and socially supple: he could charm ...”

“... history that displays her influence seems very local, mostly confined to the New York poetry of John Ashbery and Frank O’Hara or the writing of Andy Warhol, though in fact so much of Hemingway’s manner of writing – the short, paratactic sentences, the use of repetition, the idea of removing the obvious subject – was taken from her, so the whole ...”

“... has three quatrains, each containing two rhymes, followed by a rhyming couplet. There are only two major sonnet forms in English, and this is one of them, the Shakespearean. The other, the Petrarchan, is more coherent aesthetically, having only two rhymes in the octave (the first eight lines) and two more in the sestet (the last six), but it is much harder to ...”

“... to dramatic invention. By contrast with university-educated rivals like Christopher Marlowe and John Marston, or the erudite autodidact Ben Jonson, Shakespeare owed most of his classical knowledge to his education in a provincial grammar school; but, in spite of Jonson’s condescending reference to his ‘small Latin and less Greek’, Shakespeare was ...”