“... A more graphic reply is ruled out by the fact that both the editor and the assistant editor are young women, new to the job but learning fast. In the editorial half-world of the property-market giveaway glossies and Naim Attallah’s corps de ballet, lively copy is pursued in all innocence by fashionable female honourables whose idea of a rigorous literary ...”

“... than ushering in a new one’, and this view is echoed by some other remarks quoted in the book. Young poets at poetry readings say that almost every other poet is ‘their contemporary’, but not Lowell. Like Colonel Shaw of For the Union Dead he is ‘out of bounds’ now, left behind like a museum exhibit, a period photograph, while Abstract ...”

“... attempts at explanation; I had to assume that which I had balked at for such a long time, that the young gentlemen out there were not accessible to me. They were not my kind. They were the messengers of the other. But perhaps the phenomenon of the Stasi – in which I wish to include the popular fascination with the phenomenon of the Stasi, since, in the form ...”

“... trials in the 1790s alone. Everyone was rioting: miners, tanners, weavers, debtors in their jails, young gents at Eton and Winchester. The comfortable classes, from the Iron Duke downwards, fretted that the country was staggering towards revolution.And out of the taverns where the plots were hatched poured the most extraordinary cast of desperadoes and ...”

“... in 1998, of an earlier form of electronic money, eCash, developed by the computer scientist David Chaum. When Chaum’s firm, which ran the system in a centralised fashion, went bankrupt, it took eCash down with it. With bitcoin, there is no central computer, and therefore no single point of failure, but there isn’t a central record ...”

“... a good job of describing how this state of affairs came about. The story begins with an apolitical young woman whose anti-Communist convictions were so conventional that in 1959 she accepted the ceremonial title of ‘Miss Army Recruiter’. A budding Method-trained actress, the daughter of an American icon, she fell in love with Roger Vadim, the Nouvelle ...”

“... guide who would have led her ‘right in wisdom’s way’: He civilised the rude and taught the young, Made fools grow wise, such artful music hung Upon his useful, kind, instructing tongue. Rochester’s modern editors and biographers are well aware of Wharton’s elegy, but they are not interested in the personage it describes. As the ward of ...”

“... of place outside the Ritz – it was quietly innovative. One of the team’s driving forces was a young Englishwoman, Blythe Masters; another, Terri Duhon, makes no secret of her upbringing in a trailer in Louisiana; central to its technical work was an Indian mathematician, Krishna Varikooty. Boisterousness that would have horrified John Pierpont Morgan was ...”

“... some sense intrusive in wishing that they did.The marriage fell apart in the summer of 1962 when David Wevill, a Canadian poet whose work Hughes admired, and his wife, Assia, visited Court Green, the house in Devon where Hughes, Plath and their two young children were living. The Wevills stayed over the weekend of 18 to 20 ...”

“... were in contact with the Emergency Rescue Committee set up by Varian Fry, an enigmatic, daring young American who saved the lives of many illustrious figures, including Chagall, Ernst and Arendt. Fittko and Birman don’t appear to have met in 1940. Fittko remained in Marseille long enough to realise that escape via the port was nearly impossible, but she ...”

“... become Pottery Lane is the only identifiable landmark. The studio of the photographer played by David Hemmings in Antonioni’s Blow-Up is on Pottery Lane. The Grove sweeps down into Notting Dale, and passes several of the large communal gardens that are a feature of the Ladbroke Estate, and which appear in the novels of Alan Hollinghurst. People tell me ...”

“... the niceties of racial domination: Henry Bedford lynched for ‘talking disrespectfully to a young white man’; Jesse Thornton for ‘addressing a white police officer without the title “mister”’; Malcom Wright for ‘yielding too little of the roadway to a white man as he passed in his wagon’. Anthony Crawford rejected a ‘white merchant’s ...”

“... on the prominence of ‘the morbid and the tragic’ in his own work, the Guyanese poet David Dabydeen once said that ‘the plantation experience had severe and traumatic psychic impacts … but overwhelmingly had to do with what is the very ground of our being, which is our body.’ This is an obvious reason slavery goes with revenge tragedy. The ...”

“... as Philip Martin puts it. In J.M. Coetzee’s Disgrace, the dodgy English professor David Lurie’s seduction of his student is bound up with his admiration for Byron’s poetry, Lara in particular.It’s easy to forget, in this context, that Byron was the same poet who could picture possible incest and a poisoning in The Bride of Abydos ...”

“... of alternatives when presented only with the choice that has been made? As composer-pianist David Tudor once said of the piece: ‘With Boulez the form is completely external. In the big section, there’s a breathtaking sound that is just like glass. With one of us younger cats the sound itself would have dictated the form of the work, whereas that ...”