“... were preventing the private sector taking on public land to build badly needed new homes. In 2010 David Cameron commissioned Philip Green to conduct an ‘efficiency review’ for the new coalition government, and he duly reported that the state, ‘the largest tenant/owner in the country’, was ‘wholly inefficient’ when it came to the use and management ...”

“... man’, and derided Spender and Auden as lightweights when compared with ‘the redoubtable Hugh MacDiarmid’. He interrupted establishment speakers, organised demonstrations, wrote ‘Songs of Sabotage and Sedition’ and, when the war started, campaigned against its extension into a global conflict that could be settled only by the total defeat of ...”

“... He didn’t have much use for the work of his contemporaries and juniors (his fellow Celts David Jones and Hugh MacDiarmid were partial exceptions), but was on the whole pleasant about it. A breezy manner (‘Unabashed boys and girls may enjoy them. This book is theirs’), a few eclectic names ...”

“... In January 1999, Colin Middleton hanged himself in prison. He’d been in custody since 1982, when he was convicted – aged 14 – of murdering his 18-month-old niece. While in prison, he had harmed himself seriously, written to the governor about his mental illness, and spoken about suicide to other inmates. On the day before his death he didn’t leave his cell, even for meals, and placed a rug over the inspection port ...”

“... having done it in the past I knew that those stories would then end up being leaked’. Hugh Grant said it became clear to him and other people in the public eye in the mid-1990s that ‘if you had a burglary, or you got mugged or your car was broken into, you had to think really hard about whether you were going to call the police because the first ...”

“... ruled from the shadows. The transition to multiparty rule in 1989 did little to change this. As Hugh Roberts points out in The Battlefield: Algeria 1998-2002 (2003), an almost indispensable book, the introduction of pluralism merely ‘replaced a monolithic façade with a pluralist one’. The real power in Algeria resides, as it always has, with the ...”

“... known in England of the major Scots makars, easily eclipsed in the 16th century by Douglas and David Lyndsay, but the gradual decline in this period of Dunbar’s reputation in Scotland is equally striking. He raced into print ahead of several of his contemporaries, probably because of his Court assocation with the printer, Walter Chepman, but after ...”

“... replaced by less strident patterns of significance. What happens in Ulysses? Even if you accept Hugh Kenner’s explanation for the unfamiliar arrangement of furniture that causes Bloom to stumble as he climbs in through the window of 7 Eccles Street – that Molly decided against adultery and tried to drain her suitor’s ardour by getting him to move ...”

“... by foreign nationals in the main.’In his song ‘Stimela’, the South African jazz musician Hugh Masekela, who grew up in the mining area of Witbank, describes the trains coming from Namibia and Malawi, Zambia and Zimbabwe, Angola and Mozambique, carrying men to the gold and mineral mines of Johannesburg and its surrounding towns, where they would work ...”

“... culture with ‘an ongoing global process of political liberation from Western rule’, as David Murphy puts it. To drive this point home, representatives of Swapo from what is now Namibia, the African People’s Union from Zimbabwe and the ANC and Pan-Africanist Congress from South Africa were invited, and marched in the opening ceremony, a street ...”

“... debatable. It’s a shocking story, with one of the victims having been battered almost to death. David Cameron is quick to move in and claim the crime is evidence of ‘a broken society’, conveniently ignoring the fact that Edlington, the village in question, is smack in the middle of what was a mining community, a society systematically broken by Mrs ...”

“... since Grigson is a Little Englander, ‘the mob of Lowlanders who write in Lallans’ (for Hugh Macdiarmid, as for many others, he has a ferocious aversion that is never explained), and ‘the mob of Welshmen who write in Welsh ...’ At any rate, and oddly enough, France – specifically the France of Ronsard, from whom he translates four poems, two ...”

“... ear for prose. Craig Raine is represented in this selection by a poem of his own and another by David Lodge, who parodies the Martian approach so successfully that you wonder if it has quite enough to it. Blake Morrison’s ‘Xerox’ is a poem to be memorised now if you did not cut it out of the paper and keep it, but he already had a reputation so anyone ...”

“... movement, but seeming almost a normal aspect of the modern scene, like the ‘magic realism’ of David Hockney or Alex Colville. James Fenton’s ‘Dead Soldiers’, ‘A German Requiem’ and ‘Children in Exile’ are poems that work by a new and at first disconcerting technique, not to move us or to establish feeling, but to suggest a situation where ...”

“... now if one who comes of the same stock has not a right to give his opinion in such like cases. David Hume liked this story, and in 1741 retold it in his marvellous essay ‘Of the Standard of Taste’, where he wrestled with the question of whether such delicacy of judgment was really possible. Some people doubted any such thing, but he did not. Writing in ...”