“... Communicated monthly, sit and stare At the new suburb stretched beyond the run-way Where a young man lands hatless from the air. The dashing new king’s arrival in London by aeroplane was widely reported and seen as a refreshing sign of modernity: here was a prince who was both a man of the people – of the desperate poverty he saw in Wales he said ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... Im not​ as fond of David Bowie as most people seem to be. I’m certainly not dancing a reel in the streets. Some good songs, an enviable capacity to shapeshift, but not so much charm, or humility, as some who nevertheless die young, younger, with children and grandchildren to leave ...”

“... afford to purchase all the journals their researchers need, what hope do the rest of us have?’ David Prosser, executive director of Research Libraries UK, asked the Guardian. When Swartz was 21, he and three other unidentified authors wrote the ‘Guerrilla Open Access Manifesto’, the text of which is included in The Boy Who Could Change the World. It ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... common-sense gun laws’, then the NRA takes to the airwaves, ideally with an attractive young mother as its spokeswoman. She’ll say: gun control doesn’t work, it just keeps law-abiding folks from protecting their children, since criminals will always find a way to get guns. In Chicago they have some of the strictest gun laws in the nation, and ...”

“... concludes with a photograph of the poet striding towards the camera. He is a tallish, handsome young man. The photograph was taken in the autumn of 1955 when he was 28, shortly after he arrived in Montpellier to begin his Fulbright Fellowship. He looks to have the world at his feet. Earlier that year Ashbery had been turned down by the Fulbright committee ...”

“... forces that coalesced around the 2016 referendum had been gathering strength since 2010. David Cameron went into that year’s general election with an undeliverable pledge to reduce net immigration to less than a hundred thousand a year, a target he never came remotely close to hitting. With each quarterly announcement of the figures, the ...”

“... atolls had contributed to a widespread scepticism about the bomb. In 1984, the new prime minister, David Lange, announced that he would make the country a nuclear-free zone – a policy hated by the US but popular, then as now, in New Zealand. When New Zealand began to refuse permission for nuclear-powered ships to enter its ports, the US suspended New Zealand ...”

“... as if his head had sprung an oil-can leak. He was nearly caught in a compromising position with a young actress pretending to be underage in the convoluted Borat Subsequent Moviefilm mockumentary. Then there was the shlock folly of the Four Seasons press conference held not at the regal Four Seasons hotel in Philadelphia, as was presumably intended, but at ...”

“... of blacks ever made by Europeans. One of these is Reynolds’s incomplete and undated study of a young black man listening (it seems) to the winds that disturb the sky behind him, a painting long believed to be a portrait of Dr Johnson’s beloved black servant, Frank Barber. Houdon’s radiant patinated plaster head of a black woman of 1781, probably made ...”

“... I look in the index of books on either sensibility or sentiment, and if there is no reference to David Hartley I close the volume. G.J. Barker-Benfield passes the test – his index lists Hartley as well as Shaftesbury, Hume, Adam Smith and, of course, Locke, for even the non-philosophical usually know that a brief reference to Locke must be ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... 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 ...”