“... Open Frank O’Hara’s Collected Poems at random, somewhere in the middle, and you may get what looks like a Post-It note to a friend, or versified notes on a Jackson Pollock painting, a James Dean movie or ‘the music of Adolphe Deutsch’. You may also get one of many enticing, informal, secretly-complex poems that sound like nobody else ever has: How can you start hating me when I’m so comfortable in your raincoat the apples kept bumping off the old gnarled banged-up biddy-assed tree and I kept ducking and hugging and bobbing as if you were a tub of water on Hallowe’en it was fun but you threw yourself into reverse like a tractor hugging the ground in spring that was nice too more rain more raincoat                                  (‘Adventures In Living’) Who was O’Hara, and how did he learn to write like that? Born in 1926, he grew up in small towns in Massachusetts, studied piano seriously throughout high school and served in the Navy at the close of World War II ...”

“... 15,000 soldiers, with three times that number wounded. The subsequent demoralisation of the army may well have contributed to its defeat in the Six-Day War. In any case, Israel’s blitzkrieg in June 1967 sounded the death-knell of Arab nationalism. The civil war caused many left-wing nationalists and Communists in North Yemen to flee to ...”

“... Quite early one May morning, in the last days of a subarctic winter, I strayed from a marked trail I had been walking for just under two hours and discovered I was lost in the north Norwegian tundra. It was something that never should have happened: 99 times out of a hundred, I am a sensible, even cautious wanderer, but that morning, in an odd mood I couldn’t explain other than to say, lamely, that I was sorry to be leaving Finnmark, I had left the borrowed lakeside cabin where I’d been staying and decided to go for one last walk along a not at all hazardous eight-mile trail about thirty miles east of Kautokeino ...”

“... of abroad, he was reading Freud and writing short stories. The seeds of his science fiction may have been sown in wartime Shanghai, but they germinated in postwar England. His early adult life could almost be a blueprint for the struggling young writer of the mid-20th century: two years of reading medicine at Cambridge before dropping out and going to ...”

“... controls these proceedings with a Catoesque monomania and a forensically inflexible vocabulary. As David Edgar has pointed out, Dutt is the one person in the whole drama who takes exactly the same line at the beginning, the middle and the end. He is determined, not just that the Central Committee should bow to Big Brother but that they should love him ...”

“... had ‘already given wide currency to not fewer than 125 separate texts’. Another referee, David Masson, wrote that, ‘by his own unaided exertions’, Arber had ‘accomplished labours of editing and reprinting, such as might have tasked the united efforts of several Publishing Societies’. A surprising number of minor works are still only easily ...”

“... wavered in his view about how to defend them. Looking back over his work, Barry explains that like David Hume before him, Rawls has tried two arguments. The first, to which he’s been attracted, Barry believes, because it’s promised to produce a determinate result, is Glaucon’s, the argument from mutual advantage: we can gain more from co-operating with ...”

“... then: one in Montreal in 1945, one in Toronto in 1958 etc. In particular, he tells the story of David Carr, a Manchester sailor who died in 1959, and was widely reported some years ago as having been the ‘first’ Aids victim. Over the course of some fifty pages, threaded in and out of the book, Hooper elucidates Carr’s tours of duty with the ...”

“... Will not reign long as Amnesty’s new chief. Placed under stress he has been known to warp, As David Astor points out with some grief. I must say that Thorpe’s nerve gives cause to gawp. A decent silence should not be so brief. One does feel he might wear more sober togs And do things quietly in aid of dogs. Marcus Aurelius said there’s an age ...”

“... but it would be more accurate to describe him as the ‘evil genius’ of his brother-in-law David Séchard, printer, inventor, mere technician and thus true man of the 19th century, who pays dearly for being over-impressed by Lucien’s intellectuality. ‘His fatal, innocent error is to suppose that Lucien’s lofty gift is superior to his modst ...”

“... His political statements were always personal, never party-dictated. Labour between the wars may have agreed with Low’s portrayal of the Government’s remoteness from the reality of unemployment (‘In Different Worlds’) – or the futility of Anglo-French ‘non-intervention’ in Spain (‘Heah. I say, fair play!’ Eden remonstrates with Fascist ...”

“... friend, the economist Graham Hutton. The fact that the early Statesman had no fixed party abode may have helped its fortunes at least as much as it harmed them. At the start, the Webbs, Shaw, Sharp and most contributors held firmly to the view that the Parliamentary Labour Party had little to offer their kind of political rationalism, being composed largely ...”

“... Spanish Crown. Thus Ayacucho can be considered the birthplace of the modern Peruvian state, and may yet prove to be its burial site. The revolution’s ferocity has given the Corner of the Dead a new and chilling resonance. Journalists, at first mystified by the theatricality and macabre ritual of Sendero’s violence, groped for clichés, something to help ...”

“... depending on insider knowledge only others in the trade need feel troubled or titillated by. David Lodge, quoted on an Adair dust jacket saying that The Death of the Author is ‘brilliant, worthy of Nabokov’, is doing something of this kind, pretending innocence, tactfully avoiding the question of pastiche, of who’s actually in charge of this ...”

“... Instead, he conjectures that the preference given to fellow Masons in jobs and contracts may have developed informally outside the Lodge, and is no more sinister than an ‘unsystemised’ old-boy network. However, there might also be a historical explanation which Piatigorsky misses. John Brewer’s pioneering work on 18th-century commercialisation ...”