“... should say that I have been a member of Fortnight’s advisory board for five years.) Robert Johnstone, who edited the anthology’s ‘Cultural World’ section of Troubled Times, describes Fortnight as originating in ‘dark days when publishing or anything mildly progressive culturally was a novelty in strife-stricken, bomb-blasted, war-weary ...”

“... and has never really lost it. It has only just dawned on me that it might happen to me: indeed, may have happened already. I now go to the gym three times a week. I eat salad for lunch. People tell me how well I look. I suppose that means I must have been fat until recently and just didn’t realise it. Which makes me wonder: at what point are you thin and ...”

“... are 101 of them and their total length is considerably less than 1000 lines), he recalls Robert Graves’s suggestion that the long poem may be ‘nothing more than a poet’s attempt at greatness, at becoming “major” ’. While, on the one hand, Armitage asserts that ‘today, it is still the short poem that ...”

“... its music? The musicologist and advocate of the Scots language Billy Kay feels passionately about Robert Fergusson, the wild-child poet who died in the Edinburgh bedlam at 24. In Stromness, Montrose, Lochgelly, Stirling, he recited Fergusson’s verses. And then Karine Polwart sang the song that the dying Fergusson loved more than any other: ‘The Birks of ...”

“... would occupy too great an emotional space in my life and leave no room for other things which may also have been destined for me. These are the thoughts of a man who is in exile from a civilisation that no longer exists, and will be condemned, eventually, to extinction. Because of his preoccupation with memory and his fondness for long sentences, Gazdanov ...”

“... than reverential. Piper’s heyday coincided with that of Ealing Studios; indeed, his posters for Robert Hamer’s Pink String and Sealing Wax and Charles Crichton’s Painted Boats were demonstratively appropriate, though Googie Withers dolled up like a Staffordshire figure in front of a spread of Kemp Town Georgian exerted rather more box office pull than ...”

“... Robert Frost’s crack about free verse – that it’s tennis without a net – might be modified to describe Georges Perec’s novels: they’re tennis with nets everywhere. His whodunnit La Disparition (1969), a lipogram, was written without the use of the letter e (it was translated into e-less English as A Void by Gilbert Adair in 1994 ...”

“... is dismayed to notice, when his thoughts turn to ending it all – in the style of Hart Crane or Robert Maxwell – that, wherever he jumps from, he will probably only find more superyacht beneath him. A woman’s hair may be ‘a sort of aureate beige’ or ‘dyed a maximal black’. Pleasures are technical, liquid and ...”

“... which has cost the taxpayer nothing’. But what if it had been – oh, I don’t know . . . Robert Hughes, or Rolf Harris – sitting on a bed, looming over a naked 16-year-old girl, blowing the petals away from her mons veneris? Greer’s argument that modern society has forbidden women the pleasure of boys’ bodies is almost wrecked by the ...”

“... found no human presence, and there is no archaeological record of pre-European colonisation. This may be one of the very few cases in the New World in which the word ‘discovery’ is not a misnomer. In Evolution’s Workshop, his chronological account of the biological exploration of the islands, Edward Larson tells the colourful story of the visitors who ...”

“... there when it was just a military prison. For penologists, the most intriguing part of Alcatraz may be the material that shows how many prisoners made another life after release. Was there something in the hours of solitary reflection and reading that enlarged their lives? Another legend was that Alcatraz was escape-proof. The structure of the prison was ...”

“... of our religion and the shame of our country.’ England’s political and commercial elite may have been able to stomach trade with the ‘Turk’, but there is no getting around the deep-rooted (if ill-informed) antipathy shared by large swathes of the population. Their attitude is reflected by Portia’s response in The Merchant of Venice, when the ...”

“... company he wanted to join (the straight-acting insiders of the new moment, like Jasper Johns and Robert Rauschenberg and Frank O’Hara). A successful commercial artist, homosexual, Catholic, working-class – the grounds for exclusion, or self-exclusion, were multiple. Warhol’s parents were Ruthenians from the Austro-Hungarian Empire. His father came to ...”

“... but some of the most remarkable and evocative have only come to light recently, and there may be more to be discovered. Taylor is not compiling an anthology, but he listens carefully to the seamen’s voices and brings out their personalities by paraphrase more than direct quotation. Deep-sea sailors were not, as is sometimes suggested, the wretched ...”

“... between religion and fly fishing.’ Tom Fort’s Casting Shadows: Fish and Fishing in Britain may not qualify as ‘literature’; but it offers garrulous witness to a fine passion. Fort, who is a former fishing columnist at the Financial Times and the author of, among others, The Book of Eels, Against the Flow and The Far from Compleat Angler is a sort ...”