“... rocking on his wings, He scans his wide parish with a sharp eye, He catches the trembling of small hidden things, He tears them to pieces, dropping them from the sky.Yet ‘this is my country,’ the last stanza begins, ‘beloved by me best’. It’s not instantly clear why this poem is Graves’s first piece of authentic work. Though his previous ...”

“... one of the squirts of desperate rage from one of the souls in hell, makes everything else seem small and distant. It’s extremely hard, though, to describe the exact mixture of qualities that makes it wonderful. In the first half of the 20th century the Commedia was often regarded as a classic with a philosophical core ...”

“... and Russia. The Japanese, during their occupation of Korea (1910-45), transformed Chongjin from a small fishing village into an important port, with massive steelworks and chemical factories. It has been closed to foreigners since the Korean War and was also, as Demick notes, one of the places hardest hit by the devastating famine of the mid-1990s. Demick got ...”

“... Moby Dick the whale or the man?’, ‘Willa Cather – did he write The Private Life of Helen of Troy?’ Ross, it was said, hardly ever read novels and was suspicious of poetry that aspired beyond light verse. He called music and painting the ‘two phoney arts’. He was contemptuous of all ‘fancy college men’. ‘Nobody’s going to make me ...”

“... the society of the spectacle. Oh, come on – you know what it is. What do you want, a Helen Levitt street scene opposite a drone shot of children looking at their iPhones? The question is not what the spectacle consists of – the spectacle goes on making a spectacle of its least change of apparatus, the least descent down its ladder of conformity ...”

“... his own experiments, thought Rattus norvegicus might be suitable.In 1909 Donaldson’s colleague Helen King began to breed rats, selecting offspring for their docility and fertility. After six years, 28 generations and tens of thousands of rats, King had bred what she considered the ‘perfect specimen’: a stable strain that, due to intensive ...”

“... child lives in a tumult of casual information about the wide world. Lore and gossip pouring into a small child are its entry to human life. Its awareness of love and envy, greed and caring is not limited to its immediate personal interactions with family and neighbours, but is informed by the delightful or spiteful tales they tell about everybody else. All the ...”

“... Brigid Lyons Thornton, suggested that he stay in the Greville Arms Hotel in Granard, a small town 16 miles from Longford town. ‘Auntie Thornton’, as we called her, was also involved in the Republican movement: on this occasion, however, it wasn’t subversion but match-making that was on her mind. Collins might have been a revolutionary leader ...”

“... a sequel is a highly conservative genre that supplies the comfort of familiarity together with the small frisson of difference. Publishers, film studios and TV executives love sequels, since they seem to guarantee a ready-made audience. A glance at the New York Times bestseller list at the time of writing shows one sequel at the top of the list (the further ...”

“... and round in the same barrel, is sharks with shirt-jacs, sharks with well-pressed fins, ripping we small fry off with razor grins; nothing ain’t change but color and attire ... Walcott evidently means to identify himself with Spoiler. Classically educated and widely travelled, he can’t share in the brave new optimism of Independence and Black Power. He ...”

“... bedstead and side tables. They are wood, and they annoy me a little. Opposite my bed, in the very small room, a wall of mirrored cupboards reflects the whiteness back at itself, making it twice the size it thought it was. In the morning, if I arrange myself carefully when I wake, I can open my eyes to nothing but whiteness.If I trace it back, that wish for ...”

“... an American woman who kept parrots and there were perches in the downstairs room and also in its small garden. Slightly older than the other houses in the crescent, like many of them it had been a lodging house, so every room had its own gas meter and some had washbasins. I did most of the decorating myself, picking out the blurred and whitewashed frieze in ...”

“... looser horizontals of the water below.Pieter Cornelis Mondriaan was born in 1872 in Amersfoort, a small, devoutly religious city at the centre of the Netherlands. (He dropped the second ‘a’ from his surname in 1909 at the insistence of his uncle, Frits Mondriaan, also a painter, who was ashamed of his nephew’s ‘depraved’ art.) His father, the first ...”

“... to suck out the spirit until it looks the way you think it should. We are all historians in our small way. And in some ghastly way Pol Pot was more honest than the rest of us have been. Pol Pot decided to dispense with the past altogether. To dispense with the sham of treating the past with objective respect. In Cambodia the cities were to be wiped ...”

“... to the magnitude of the earth’. In her more recent Faber Book of Contemporary American Poetry, Helen Vendler has made a comparable point, arguing that geographically and topographically there must be many American poetries: ‘There will be no American landscape that does not speak in words as well as in line and colour.’ I am hoping to suggest that ...”