“... extend the anthology’s reach beyond what Ricks terms ‘our precious stones from Land’s End to John o’Groats, leave alone the emerald of Ireland’. On the other hand, the editorial policy excludes ‘the British Empire or the British Commonwealth’ through a historical Catch-22. Post-colonial poets are refused entry on the separate-but-equal principle ...”

“... boat. This time, however, it was not the thought of pretty girls that diverted him but his friend John Evelyn’s ‘pretty’ new book ‘against Solitude’. Evelyn’s Publick employment and an active life prefer’d to solitude, published in 1667, was written to refute Sir George Mackenzie’s 1665 work, A Moral Essay, Preferring Solitude to Public ...”

“... in his Swiss château, to Colonel Friedman, on secondment from the US artillery, to recruits like Major Walters, not yet a staff officer treading the backstairs of 10 Downing Street, as well as a phalanx of fresh-faced subalterns, all set on loading the shells into the breech to fire off in the next IEA bombardment. Their order of the day is worth quoting at ...”

“... E-flattish atonality of the Suite is laughed off by Stravinsky’s unabashed key of A minor-major. The music bursts out like water from a broken main.’ Stravinsky’s use of serialism became increasingly rigorous, but even at its strictest, as in the choral-orchestral Threni of 1958 (another Venice premiere), he never sounds like Schoenberg. The ...”

“... in ideas and traducing their concepts in the process. By 1983, the centenary of the birth of both John Maynard Keynes (died 1946) and Joseph Alois Schumpeter (died 1950), it was the less dirigiste Schumpeter, so economists were saying, who spoke to the needs of the hour. The Age of Keynes thus gave way to the Age of Schumpeter, as can be confirmed by ...”

“... It’s hard to miss the teleology in this part of the story: the artist as a young man absorbs his major influences – Shanghai, London, psychoanalysis, Surrealism – and all he needs now is a form that will enable him to channel them into his writing. Tiring of the ‘grey and overcrowded’ capital, he signed up for a short service commission in the ...”

“... began a cultural decline that is now destroying the values ‘we’ hold most dear.Nolan’s other major addition to Homer’s narrative is the repeated reference to threats to ‘our civilisation’ from ‘the sea peoples’ – a now debunked 19th-century theory about maritime tribes who were thought to have attacked Egypt around 1200 bce and to have also ...”

“... listeners with music, along with record shops, mail-order labels, American college radio and John Peel’s late evening show: a self-sustaining terrarium of ‘indie’ culture; a lost world.Music and life were indistinguishable for Reynolds in the decade after 1984, an intensely productive period that took in his entire employment at Melody ...”

“... and unified Germany’s tournament in 2006 – the Sommermärchen – was its first major sporting event since the 1936 Olympics, with the schwarz-rot-gold flag newly ubiquitous. A World Cup qualifier in 1969 ignited political tensions between El Salvador and Honduras, in an episode made famous by Ryszard Kapuściński’s ...”

“... be rejected. Her second choice was Brandeis, known at the time as ‘Jew U’. She was a classics major, and her reading is evident in her adult work: there’s Propertius, Catullus, her Eurydice in the Underworld, and so on. She was fond of claiming that classical authors had never seen the need for originality in their narratives, so why should she?Acker ...”

“... Proms. Think Morning Service at the village church, carols from King’s College Cambridge, Elton John singing to the nation from Westminster Abbey. Think popular music in general and, when Plato brings in a parallel from the visual arts, forget the Tate Gallery and recall the advertisements that surround us everywhere. Above all, think about the way all this ...”

“... doubly private. Harold Macmillan’s Conservative government wasn’t going to nationalise a major industry if it could help it. The state bookmaker (the Tote, which operated on the French system of pooling bets) was forced to compete for custom with privately owned rivals, which could offer more tempting fixed odds. But the British government wasn’t ...”

“... and Josephine abandoned their new house, and in the autumn of 1906 moved to 4 Marlborough Road, St John’s Wood, where they spent the rest of their lives. A photo taken in the back garden shows Chester wearing a suit, Josephine in a deckchair. It wasn’t Crag Head. The garden had a single pear tree, which they jokingly called ‘the orchard’. In 1908 ...”

“... he would have been disappointed. There was some half-hearted praise from Movement types, but when John Carey, for example, needed an honourable popular writer to batter the highbrows with in The Intellectuals and the Masses (1992), he turned to Arnold Bennett. Morgan’s biography had a memorable centrepiece: a description of the senile Maugham crapping on ...”