“... he is ‘finical, awkward’, concerned only with minutiae, with the ‘dragging grains’ of sand he is condemned to spend his life investigating. Bishop, one suspects, knew rather more about real birds than Shelley did; like Marianne Moore, she prided herself on her ability to capture the feel of different species through accurate ...”

“... in the cells. A major disappearance is the railway bridge that once carried, along with promos for George Davis and Reggie Kray, passengers from Dalston Junction to Broad Street: a lovely aerial view of industry, canal, domestic and commercial property, Shoreditch to City. You saw, precisely, where you were. For a token fee (often no fee), you became a ...”

“... wind-honed archipelago. Many of them are inhabited. The islands are whale-shapes, as their poet George Mackay Brown noted. Few trees impede the wind. Water, salt and fresh, in wide bays or lochs or channels, is always to hand, lightening and softening the land it encircles. The land is fertile, the people prosperous, Norse, liberal, and they live in two ...”

“... of Being Earnest was to open on 14 February. Wilde attended rehearsals, and was persuaded by George Alexander, the actor-manager, who was producing the play and performing in it, to drop the act in which Algernon is almost arrested for debt. This play, too, was a huge success, with both critics and audiences. ‘Oscar Wilde,’ the New York Times ...”

“... which precipitated perhaps the most dangerous financial crisis in the history of the republic (as George W. Bush said of his country’s economy at the time, ‘This sucker could go down’). The memoirs of Bush’s secretary of the Treasury, Hank Paulson, make clear his utter terror at what the forthcoming election might do to his rescue plans if either ...”

“... of that Surrey speciality, the gated High Class Suburb (as Nairn, no ironist, called them): St George’s Hill, Wentworth, Camilla Lacey and so on. They would come in time to be valued by persons greedy for plastic columns: white collar criminals, oligarchs’ security apes, footballers, light entertainers and seedy golf pros – the improbable successors ...”

“... envied and wrestled with as an equal artist. Eliot and Yeats, her early delights. Anne Sexton and George Starbuck, with a few ‘immortal’ love poems between them. ‘Skunk Hour’ (Lowell’s response to Bishop’s ‘The Armadillo’) is instrumental, since it includes the poet as part of a blasted landscape: the hell of its heaven and earth, or the ...”

“... to Brooklyn, its far end; the abomination of desolation, the houses thinned to nothing, the blank sand, the shattered cabaret with the sign, ‘The Girl You Bring is the Girl You Take Home’, the new cabaret in the middle of waste silence, with ambitious men aligning the brilliant trims; the shades along the last street and at its head a small young brick ...”

“... standards the provenance of the ‘Rabban Pattu’ is modest. According to the St Thomas scholar George Menachery, the ‘Rabban Pattu’ is ‘the substratum of all the traditions concerning the Apostolate of St Thomas in South India, even if some minor details may be backward projections from the concepts of the Church’s life at the time of the latest ...”

“... was that Brooke was not allowed to eat meat in his childhood (Ninny asserted it ‘caused sand in his water’), a curtailment which, when he first went to school, nearly resulted in death from starvation, as nothing was added to his plate of routine vegetables, a component of the menu at its lowest ebb in school fare during the first war. Thought of ...”

“... poem is in Worcester College, Oxford, and though it cannot definitely be proved to be by Marvell, George Clark, the early editor who discovered it, believed it was. In the poem, Marvell says:                                ’Tis always late To struggle with inevitable fate. Much rather though, I know, expect’st to tell How ...”

“... And, of Castlemaine: ‘Her Grace of Cleveland,/Has swallowed more pricks than the ocean has sand.’ Evelyn, a frequent visitor to Whitehall, lamented the court’s ‘inexpressible luxury and profaneness, gaming, and all dissoluteness’. The Restoration court, as Kevin Sharpe has described, was an ambivalent place. Traditional ideals were in conflict ...”

“... of state for transport and the environment. In 2004 two members of the intake of 2001, Cameron and George Osborne, joined her in the shadow cabinet. Both quickly established themselves as part of the leader’s inner circle, from which she was excluded. In three years, and seemingly without having to do much more than show up, Cameron had got closer to the ...”

“... to it, along with the retired army sergeant next door who had been East and seen a thing or two. George Orwell offers a sharper insight into the meaning of ‘post-truth’ in his reflections on the success of pro-Franco propaganda in the aftermath of the Spanish Civil War. ‘I know it is the fashion to say that most of recorded history is lies ...”

“... his life, not only for his living, but at making himself grander than he was; and Bram Stoker and George Bernard Shaw, who were hardly more than clerks. And then Sean O’Casey who was poor and nearly blind. All of them baptised into the wholly un-Roman and highly Protestant church. And none of them believed a word of it except poor Lady Gregory, who hoped ...”