“... had been worn out only by student travels to Paris and Heidelberg and, almost certainly, Italy. Robert Tracy gives an account of the main influences in the air at the time of Mandelstam’s first book, Stone, here translated in toto into rhymed verse, with a parallel Russian text, an excellent introduction and very illuminating notes. Tracy evokes the world ...”

“... young man’s name is Chevalier, which was the name of the man friendship with whom helped to ruin Robert Oppenheimer’s career. Chevalier was not gay but equally reprehensibly a Communist. 11 May, Long Crichel. Yesterday as I was driving down to Dorset (with no radio) the prime minister had gone up to Trimdon and his constituency of Sedgefield in order to ...”

“... to be grossly exploited when you can buy a small British chicken in Aldi for £1.87 and a medium bird for £3. The president of the British Veterinary Association and the head of food policy at Which? continue to insist that chlorine-washing chickens does mask dodgy animal husbandry and that rates of foodborne disease are far higher in the US.Nor are things ...”

“... because he is the least known of the writer-critics, and his French is often not straightforward. Robert Baldick, biographer of Huysmans (1955) and translator of his most famous novel, À Rebours, described his style as ‘one of the strangest literary idioms in existence’. Léon Bloy, a fellow writer and fellow Catholic, described it as ‘continually ...”

“... Ford swore his wished-for wheels would rush     The century off its feet. The Soviet Butcher Bird announced     The new age with a tweet.The butcherbird is in fact native to Australia, but that doesn’t stop Hughes punning on its name in his off-kilter search for a way of introducing the massacres that followed the Russian Revolution. There’s a ...”

“... and a vigorous force on the folk music scene.) In 1935, the year of the general election, Robert Conquest stood as the Communist candidate in the mock election at Winchester and Frank deputised for him during the campaign. Some of the teachers were happy to see the boys thinking along these lines – or thinking at all about the drastic turn that ...”

“... at others ‘a ditch full of clear cold water where all the frogs have died. It is a bird without feathers; a purse without money; an old dry apple, or the gutters run pure claret.’ This sounds very like Lawrence, except for the balancing, divided attitude. Hughes, it’s clear, is the most important writer to emerge from English Nonconformism ...”

“... Complaints (1591), Samuel Daniel’s Delia (1592), Michael Drayton’s Idea’s Mirror (1594) and Robert Tofte’s Laura (1597). Tofte is included for his title, but also as a representative of the many inferior warblers troubling the presses at this time. The glut of sweetmeats provoked a predictable backlash of anti-Petrarchan satire and parody. Among the ...”

“... Well, I could never write a verse, ­– could you?Let’s to the Prado and make the most of time.Robert Browning, ‘How It Strikes a Contemporary’The world has an established place for poems about paintings – sometimes you wonder if there was ever a poet who didn’t write one – but, oddly, the poem-painting relationship doesn’t seem to be reversible ...”

“... Dusty. Naomi Mitchison. Ted Hughes, Christopher Logue (whose recording of poetry and jazz, Red Bird, I’d bought with my pocket money at St Christopher’s), Lindsay Anderson, Fenella Fielding. A Portuguese couple, described to me as ‘a poet in exile and his glamorous wife’, would remain friends of Doris, about the only ones who did, until her ...”

“... Accounts survive of imperial funerary rites culminating in the release of an eagle, Jupiter’s bird, from the funeral pyre, its soaring upward flight symbolising the ascent of the emperor’s soul to join the gods. Emperors were depicted ascending to the heavens on eagles’ wings, or in flying chariots. By late antiquity classical images of apotheosis ...”

“... tries to rise to as a correspondent, giving exquisite elegies for old friends like Mrs Kemble and Robert Louis Stevenson; even the noble, scrupulous and harrowing account of his loved sister’s last days and hours is improved by an altered phrase. Some things probably came near to defeating him, though he records them desperately. Professor Edel chooses to ...”

“... up to the New Abbey. In its surrounds were a tumulus where the ancient Scots kings, including Robert the Bruce, had had their bones interred. And Macbeth himself? Around those grounds were numerous Celtic crosses, planted like miniature saplings, most of them only replicas of destroyed originals. The shape of the Celtic cross was remarkably endearing to ...”

“... he shows the Major the grounds, and after punishing a spaniel for killing a chicken by tying the bird round its neck, indicates a diamond-shaped bed of lavender: ‘“Planted by my dear wife.” After a moment, as if to clear up a possible misunderstanding, he added: “Before she died.”’ That evening, the Major looks out from the cat-filled bar and ...”

“... a flannelette nightie. Did that give licence to the next day’s BBC Book Programme, opened by Robert Robinson on the proposition that ‘the judges made the wrong choice’? A ‘favourite aunt’, ‘a jam-making grandmother’, ‘Pooterish’, ‘distrait’: this is the sort of thing people wrote about the figure Fitzgerald presented, finding a ...”