“... Burgess, Blunt and Philby cases has to be less about the current television image of privileged young Bolsheviks conspiring to the sound of choirboys in the ancient quad than about the sheer blithering incompetence of the mandarins who let them get away. But one could usually survive one’s blunders in the British Foreign Service if one came from the right ...”

“... for more traditional school syllabuses or by more conventional behaviour on the part of the young. But all of that is happening on a more modest scale. It could become less modest if there was a real threat to the stability of society – for instance, from an escalation of inner-city rioting. But for the moment the shift has been not from Progress to ...”

“... perceptual and moral insight that it might appear. ‘Against Portraits’ and ‘A Self-Portrait: David’, both from later collections, make such insecurity their theme. The poet prefers here a face half-hesitant, face at a threshold. Still, his poems remain preserved, for reasons given in ‘Against Extremity’, from more threatening instabilities of the ...”

“... a narrative as gripping and graphic as that in any magazine. Kit, in his younger days, resembled a young Auden without genius or much talent. He was ‘notoriously shambolic’; a schoolmaster called him ‘the inkiest boy I ever knew’. As publicity manager for the ETC at Oxford he did nothing ‘until two days before the first night. He then had hundreds of ...”

“... is related to his not being a Modernist, his not being willing to ‘go all the way’ with his young mentor Pound. A further charge against him is that he wrote prose versions of his poems and then worked them up ‘into an arrangement of images, lines and rhythms’. The word ‘poem’ is here slyly avoided because such practices seem to show that Yeats ...”

“... Williams’s five boys. In April 1994 Maxine had left the family home she shared with her husband David Handley in Newark Knok, and taken the kids to live at the house of her boyfriend Alex Joseph, at Lobelia Close in Beckton. Daniel went to Beckton Cross primary school, and was one of those kids who’d talk to anyone. He already had girlfriends, and was one ...”

“... too fashionable.’ Yet only a few years after the Beau’s creditors forced him into exile, the young dandies were wearing make-up, enormously high shirt collars, stiff lapels on their coats and corsets to produce wasp-waists, with padding on the chest, the rump and the calves. It was in response to these excesses of dandy fashion that Brummell’s doctrine ...”

“... or salivary glands o death take them lightly as the Colombian goddess who makes love to young warriors on the battlefield holding a butterfly between her lips. The exotic connection that this poem proposes, between a modern nuclear disaster and a South American myth, has an acceptably eerie quality, the symmetrical delicacy of the details ...”

“... from adult cells, the conclusion that adult mammals could not be cloned, a journalistic hoax (David Rorvik’s announcement that he had helped a wealthy eccentric clone himself), a brilliant experimentalist (Karl Illmensee) accused of faking results, and, finally, a small band of mavericks working outside the prestigious centres of biotechnology in the ...”

“... Born,​ out of wedlock, in Rome in 1880 to a high-spirited, convent-educated but unconventional young aristocrat of Russian, Polish and Italian descent, the poet Apollinaire was given no fewer than five prénoms by his mother: his full name, in its French version, was Guillaume-Albert-Wladimir-Alexandre-Apollinaire de Kostrowitzky ...”

“... powerful TV executives led him to become the editor of World in Action and then the producer for David Frost, both current affairs institutions. Still in his mid-twenties, Birt breathed tear gas while filming demonstrations, had a gun pointed at him in Bangladesh, and set up interviews in South Wales with implacable striking miners – by 1972 he felt he was ...”

“... part. Here is a 1957 letter about their relationship from O’Hara to Ashbery, which appears in David Lehman’s useful The Last Avant Garde (1998): I don’t see any use in either of us going through the strain of pretending we like each other as much as we once did. I don’t know why, for instance, he has singled me out for the accusation that I’ve ...”

“... Hebrew prayers on stage with a kippah on his head, wore a blazer decorated with the Star of David and, after school, went to classes on the Koran. After his mother died of cancer Begg spent some time being looked after by his father’s non-Muslim girlfriend, Josephine, who introduced him to Christmas stockings, Christmas pudding with silver ...”

“... York put on a solo exhibition of his work, and he founded Magnum with three others: Robert Capa, David Seymour (known as ‘Chim’) and George Rodger. When he saw his friend’s show in New York, Capa advised Cartier-Bresson to be cautious. ‘You will be labelled the little surrealist photographer,’ he wrote: ‘you will be lost, and will become precious ...”

“... about the ‘true’ writings of Karl Ove Knausgaard, or the huge amount of attention paid to David Shields’s polemic Reality Hunger. Time and again we hear about a new desire for the real, about a realism which is realistic set against an avant-garde which isn’t, and so on. It’s disheartening that such simplistic oppositions are still being put ...”