“... by a consortium of friends, business associates and family, including Robert’s younger brother Donald, who was lent £1700 by his bankrupt elder brother to join in the deal. One limited company had gone bust but, as so often, another with a similar name sprung up in its place, and employed the ‘indefatigable’ (but bankrupt) entrepreneur at £7 a ...”

“... voices. In ‘January’, one asks: ‘Mommy what’s this fork doing?/What?/It’s being Donald Duck.’ Domestic conversation blends into a kind of surrealism whose hectic music mimics the rhythms of family life. Voices interweave. ‘Edmund. Edmund. Edmund. Maaah. Lodle lodle lodle.’ Many of the poems reflect on the ‘radical bodily change’ of ...”

“... of the time, before pharaohs and pyramids, when everything was still to come’: the Miami-born Donald Justice found the passage in Henry James for me at the beginning of my time here. ‘Saigon, 1969,’ my friend Larry Joseph said, when I sat him in Leonardo’s coffee bar a block away from campus. ‘Fucking Yucatan,’ I called it, not dismissively but ...”

“... a pound of superfluous flesh.’ He was an ‘unusually handsome man’, whose eyes filled with light ‘in the sunshine of his smile’. As an army cadet at West Point, his ‘magnificent physique’ and statuesque appearance on horseback won him a nickname, ‘the Marble Model’. Lee knew how to make the most of his looks. From the age of sixteen he ...”

“... have a duty to recognise this. They must not attempt to divert or thwart it, to persist, as Donald Mitchell puts it, ‘in the use ... of a language which has lost the power of meaningful speech’. This ‘exhausted language’ argument is aptly put against Strauss because he himself used it against Brahms. Its force is not so much intellectual as ...”

“... trusted to keep them. When the younger Bush, after the 2006 election, brought in Gates to replace Donald Rumsfeld at defence, he would have had in mind that history of loyalty to the Bush family. With Abu Ghraib and Bagram and Guantánamo to think of, Gates was a man to trust. Also, Gates might help to slow and muffle the incessant pressure from Cheney and ...”

“... were spotted over US airbases in East Anglia. After his enthusiasm for this sort of thing came to light, the Sun contacted John Hanson, one of the book’s authors, who declared that ‘any sensible person’ would be interested in a phenomenon ‘that has baffled mankind for millennia’.The extent to which Philip was a sensible person remains open to ...”

“... her a kind of Bowie figure for many younger listeners who may never have heard of Sol LeWitt or Donald Judd, Robert Pruitt or Lynette Yiadom-Boakye, before Solange referenced them. There’s a fascinating autodidact’s story there, I think, which is very different from today’s more usual social media dream of effortless, instantaneous global ...”

“... embryo of a new world governed by atavistic fears, whose most malign symptom is the presidency of Donald Trump. Pfeffer, a correspondent for Haaretz, has written a biography of Benjamin Netanyahu as a way of explaining today’s Israel – by no means an enviable task. Say what you will about Netanyahu’s predecessors, they had their fascination, from the ...”

“... Soon​ after firing James Comey, Donald Trump baited the former FBI director. ‘Comey better hope that there are no “tapes” of our conversations before he starts leaking to the press!’ Trump tweeted. Comey replied a month later, while testifying before the Senate intelligence committee. ‘Lordy,’ he said, ‘I hope there are tapes ...”

“... Out of the upheaval in 1965 which led to the departure of the other Welsh thruster, Donald Baverstock, he emerged triumphantly as Controller of Programmes, Television, or C.P. Tel. in the old Civil Service terminology of the BBC. Finally he succeeded Kenneth Adam in the top job to become the first managing director of the service, or ...”

“... in a conformist desert. But however heavy the yoke of opinion, that of law was undoubtedly light. Alexander Herzen commented that ‘in England the policeman at your door or within your doors adds a feeling of security.’ Malwida von Meysenburg experienced ‘a pleasant feeling of freedom’ when no one asked to see her passport on her ...”

“... to get a deal to write a book of criticism on John Barth, Robert Coover, Rudolph Wurlitzer and Donald Barthelme. The proposal was rejected. Though ‘crushed at the time’, White was later glad, because metafiction ‘no longer intrigues’ him ‘or anyone else’. It’s ‘the sort of storytelling,’ he writes in City Boy, that is ‘hyperconscious of ...”

“... became unprofitable or unmanageable, gorse, broom and blackberry took over. There was much light and much wind. In summer gorse fires threw up dense billowing columns of brown smoke, broken by bursts of orange flame. The fire engines came, another patch of blackened hillside was born, but the houses seemed to withstand it – the thin, dry furze must ...”

“... The generational divide is the one that still counts above all, but it appears in a very different light now compared with just a few weeks ago.What is society, then, to the likes of Whitty and Vallance, the men whom Johnson is said to be obeying so loyally? Ultimately it is a network, made up of billions of interconnected nodes. You can try to impose a nation ...”