“... guilt-imbued and looking for art to heal the wounds of religion, already a version of Stephen Dedalus? By the end of the book, in self-imposed exile, he’s even answering to the name of Stephen.Other ambitious 20th-century American writers have tried to find a way of synthesising the internal perspective and ...”

“... content to oneAimless for faces rather there than here.Beams from your car may cross a bedroom wall,They wake no sleeper; you may hear the windArriving driven from the ignorant seaTo hurt itself on pane, on bark of elmWhere sap unbaffled rises, being Spring;But seldom this. Near you, taller than grass,Ears poise before decision, scenting danger.My teachers ...”

“... cinema. On a visit to Cramond, on the city’s outskirts, he had noticed on the terribly white wall of the public lavatory a lone graffito: ‘Is there nobody queer in Cramond?’ Karl wanted out.It was at Cambridge that I first met him. We were both born in Edinburgh, but his background was working-class and mine was not. That seemed not to matter. Karl ...”

“... dignified, easy-paced, pedagogic. He instructs, he remembers, he references: books on fire by Stephen Pyne of Phoenix, Arizona; a text called Primeval Forest by ‘a biology guy’ called Chris Maser; articles from the Nation on food stamps. Like many American poets inspired by open-field poetics – the monologues, essays and never-ending exchanges of ...”

“... become a tourist site. It seems incredible to me that the period between the fall of the Berlin Wall and the collapse of the World Trade towers will be perceived as some sort of golden age – albeit one characterised by the production of disaster movies ranging from the Gulf War to Pearl Harbor. After several days of uncertainty, the US President found his ...”

“... were written to members of the Norton family.) With the Nortons in London, James saw Leslie Stephen, whom James’s father had also known, and met Charles Dickens’s daughter, who was, he reported to Alice, ‘plain-faced, ladylike (in black silk & black lace)’, and visited William Morris and his family. Mrs Morris was ‘a figure cut out of a missal ...”

“... everybody else has been banging and smashing, casually trickles the winning shot down the back wall. As always, having dreaded an English victory I am mortified by their defeat; the truth is I want them neither to win nor to lose, though the frenzy after the first goal is a reminder of how intolerable we would have been in victory. 14 July. There seems ...”

“... hit a truck. He liked to boast that his father was a millionaire, but Harry was hit badly by the Wall Street Crash and died not long afterwards (he had a heart condition). Schwartz might yet have inherited a few thousand dollars from the estate had Harry’s executor not swindled the family by continuing to speculate with Harry’s money after his death. In ...”

“... society whichever government we live under. 20 February, Yorkshire. Via Mallerstang to Kirkby Stephen and Barnard Castle, the tops still veined with snow and in the late afternoon bathed in a rich tawny light, the valleys in shadow with the hills still catching the sun. We have tea at Muker, where we look in the church which is dull and scraped, how dull ...”

“... social action. Has the Abbey Theatre done nothing for Ireland?’Many years later, in a letter to Stephen Spender, Auden described Yeats as ‘my own devil of unauthenticity’ and referred to the ‘false emotions, inflated rhetoric, empty sonorities’ in his work. As he embarked on his poem in memory of Yeats, he must have been aware of the kind of ...”

“... of the images d’Epinal – the Black Madonna of Czestochowa, Wenceslas Square, the Crown of St Stephen; the liberator Pope, the philosopher President, the Nobel electrician – with which the media could uplift audiences in the West. Kadare might be a better writer than Havel, but apart from a few readers in France, who cared? No Montenegrin estate lay ...”

“... a poet be a novelist? Why not?’ Then, in late 1962, after she’d torn the phoneline out of the wall during an argument with her husband, Ted Hughes, and he had left her and their two infant children in Devon, there were only letters. ‘I am fine,’ she wrote to her mother in America. ‘Just need a settled nanny & to rest & write & letters. I love & live ...”

“... into a ship. All the walls were painted grey, battleship grey. Everything was grey except the wall where my books are and the bathroom, which was red, a dusty red.’ The Kendalls avoided the alienation from the familiar rhythms of the city experienced by other East Enders who moved out to suburban council estates. ‘You knew everybody anyway because ...”

“... variation in Brahms’s Handel set and sings these words to its subject: ‘There was a bee/Upon a wall,/and it said buzz and that was all;/And it said buzz and that was all.’ As Forster cheerfully remarks, Proust, who made so much of his own little ear-worm, would have winced at this. My irritation is worsened by my inability to make the words fit the ...”

“... was just RBS, whose arrangements weren’t especially baroque by the standards of the City and Wall Street. RBS had no involvement in the Structured Investment Vehicles – SIVs – whose main purpose is to keep things off the balance sheet. SIVs involved borrowing short in order to lend long, the same dazzlingly successful financial model that underpinned ...”