“... many older folk in the village, apart from Nan Shepherd. She had taught my mother, whose name was May Salmond, between 1950 and 1953 at Aberdeen Training Centre, where students were ‘trained’ to be teachers. The general method of instruction conformed to the norms of the 1950s classroom: students were addressed like children, desks were laid out in rows ...”

“... Historyes of Troye that he was born in the Kentish Weald (he gives this as the reason his English may come across as particularly rude and simple, but he must also have spoken French, and probably Dutch and German too). He was apprenticed into the Mercers’ Company of London in 1438, and by 1450 he was in Bruges, dealing in pewter, cloth and wool. He settled ...”

“... dandy’s liking for a dressing-gown); ‘splendid work’ with the Combined Cadet Force. Chatwin may have been a butterfly but he was also something of a trooper, soldiering on towards the day he would make a name for himself. ‘It was his audacity that endeared him to those people,’ he wrote in a school essay on the Dutch painter, Kees Van Dongen and the ...”

“... attempt to resurrect the school spirit on the battlefield has a foretaste of doom about it. Tears may after all be in order, tears hardly knowing what they mean, though one knows only too well what they meant for Wilfred Owen in the Somme trenches 24 years later. After that war Newbolt was soon forgotten – in spite of a hugely successful tour of ...”

“... to dismantle an entire category of weaponry. The abrupt end of the Cold War, paradoxically, may be the reason, for with attention focused on the collapse of Soviet authority in Eastern Europe, the reunification of Germany, and ultimately the disintegration of the Soviet Union itself, arms control came to seem mundane, even irrelevant. The sense of ...”

“... make any sense. It’s the poverty of the possible in such cases that makes us think the job may be impossible, and of course with poetry the difficulties escalate drastically, since now we have rhythm and tonality and undercurrents and much else to deal with. Paterson says his (excellent) versions of a selection of Antonio Machado’s poems are ...”

“... reasoned hypothesis) as one component of ‘adequate historical explanation’. Its propositions may not be susceptible of proof; but if we talked only about what we could prove, our commentaries on the past, and on the present, would be too jejune to retain attention. Williamson distances himself from the problem by collapsing the distinction between the ...”

“... for example, he claimed that ‘Eberhart ... is a prolific writer, so the metaphysical pieces may merely be poetic callisthenics to keep him fit until his next burst of creative energy.’ Of Hugh MacDiarmid in 1962: ‘He has managed a curious creative amalgam of old and new, uniting great feeling for his country, its traditions and language, with the ...”

“... pages of Cardinal Gasquet and the belligerence of Belloc: ‘Heretics all, whoever you may be,/In Tarbes or Nimes, or over the sea,/You never shall have good words from me./Caritas non conturbat me.’ Duffy could never have written anything as unpleasant as that. But he could have been the target of ...”

“... is the pillaging of the Strand by the Vikings. The ninth-century church of St Clement Danes may have been named in commemoration of the Great Heathen Army’s overwintering in London in 871-72. I shall think of Vikings huddling together for warmth when I walk from Embankment to Joe Allen’s, on the corner of Burleigh Street and the Strand, for birthday ...”

“... only the description of the dog is given as a quotation (I’m not quite sure why; I suppose there may be spaniels who don’t look lugubrious). However, when I pursued the incident to its source in the published version of Spender’s journals, I found none of the detail of the earlier accident, merely a mention that the car-door incident ‘brought to mind ...”

“... Levy announced by Rishi Sunak when he was chancellor of the Exchequer in the far-off days of May 2022 seemed to meet this requirement – which is why it’s described as a ‘windfall tax’. What this label implies is that chance circumstances, not the efforts or foresight of the beneficiaries, have resulted in a huge financial gain that can be taxed ...”

“... escape from longing; her slight qualification – ‘without hope, without hope of return’ – may imply that, even in glorious isolation, certain hopes persist. And besides, what is being relished here is the contemplation of such a fate, not necessarily the fate itself. Delicious, no doubt, but only when one is in the mood. In The Voyage of the Dawn ...”

“... to spirit of conversation, but I at the same time think the process of modulation and inflection may be quite as complete, or more so, without the external enunciation; and that an author had better try the effect of his sentences on his stomach than on his ear. This is Hazlitt’s way of avoiding claptrap; he’s pleased, for instance, that Shakespeare ...”

“... we drop down into Kendal and the Abbot Hall gallery, where there is a touring exhibition of Robert Bevan pictures. The shows at Abbot Hall are just the right size, and never more than three or four rooms. The Bevans are shown alongside other Camden Town paintings, the best of which is a lovely, glowing, slightly abstract picture by Spencer Gore, The ...”