“... as awe-struck admirers of the Sublime used to call it, is one of the unquestioned show-pieces of North American geology. The word ‘show-piece’ seems appropriate because the Grand Canyon, to give it the name canonised by the advertising of the Atchison, Topeka and Santa Fe Railroad, is a kind of permanent media-event whose skilful presentation to the ...”

“... was held hostage in Beirut, journalists found themselves asking what his links were with Oliver North. I have on my desk the daubs of a class of five-year-olds from Stockport, Cheshire, who were commissioned to re-create the scenes that the TV man John McCarthy would have missed during his captivity. Employed by the same ...”

“... of the night, Death on the Instalment Plan, and two that he wrote after 1945, Castle to Castle and North – are a brilliantly warped commentary on what he wanted us to know he had been through in his life, from a stinted, inhumane childhood in Paris in the opening years of the century to a last decade of sour, fulminating reclusion on the slopes of Meudon ...”

“... which uses the Upper House as a clerk might use Tippex. The ‘sober second thought’ which Sir John Macdonald, the first Canadian premier (and a notable inebriate) attributed to senates is largely the stuff of legend. To see what lessons may be learned from abroad, Meg Russell has examined seven upper houses in modern democracies. Rather oddly, she omits ...”

“... song was that of a raped and mutilated woman. In the poetry of the 13th-century Franciscan John Peckham, the nightingale foresees the hour of her own death, singing from the top of a tree and descending ever lower, until finally she expires on the lowest branch at the ninth hour.Nightingales winter in sub-Saharan West Africa and then journey six ...”

“... Sir John Low​ finally hung up his helmet seventy years after joining the Madras army in 1804, having served the East India Company as soldier, jailer, agent and councillor. As a rookie lieutenant, his regiment mopped up in Mysore when the British took over the old kingdom of Tipu Sultan. He helped see off the Marathas at the battle of Mahidpur in 1817, and kept their chief minister, Baji Rao, under house arrest on the banks of the Ganges ...”

“... charter cruises on it. At the beginning of the week we’d been forty miles out in the Atlantic, north-west of Cape Wrath, exploring the uninhabited island of North Rona and the gannetry at Sula Sgeir. We’d gladly have spent the whole week on Rona, and that had been the plan. But an easterly wind had risen, and because ...”

“... General Sir Charles Napier, the commander of the forces against the 1839 Chartist uprising in the North, reported: ‘The Tory magistrates are bold, violent, irritating and uncompromising; the Whig magistrates sneaking and base.’ To W.P. Roberts they were all men of property, defending their property in the law courts. While they talked about ‘physical ...”

“... in a country whose people wanted to kill them. We had already been ambushed by the Mojaheddin north of Charikar and when we had been driving southwards for another five hours, the convoy commander sitting next to me in the Soviet Army truck asked me if I liked Afghanistan. It was a beautiful country, I replied with a journalist’s discretion. But what ...”

“... Duncan, Allen Ginsberg’s Ankor Wat and, most significantly, two volumes by Lorine Niedecker, North Central and My Life by Water, and George Oppen’s Collected Poetry. Of British poets, apart from Bunting, Montgomery published four collections by Roy Fisher, one by Ian Hamilton Finlay, David Jones’s The Tribune’s Visitation, an early collection by ...”

“... residence rights. Everyone else is there on a temporary work visa: professionals from the Global North; Filipinos, who make up a large proportion of Qatar’s domestic workers and cleaners; Africans, many of whom work as taxi drivers or security guards; and almost a million men from South Asia, Nepal and Bhutan who have toiled to build the new city. This ...”

“... In ‘A Wave’, the title-poem of his new collection, John Ashbery says, among many other things: One idea is enough to organise a life and project it Into unusual but viable forms, but many ideas merely Lead one thither into a morass of their own good intentions. The reference to ‘one idea’ recalls the passage in ‘Esthétique du Mal’ where Wallace Stevens dismisses                                      the lunatic of one idea         In a world of ideas, who would have all the people Live, work, suffer and die in that idea In a world of ideas ...”

“... life: railside Illinois, Seattle and the Pacific Northwest, Alaska, Black Mountain College in North Carolina, a film festival in Havana, San Francisco, Rome, Avignon, Paris, London, Colchester. That list comes in no particular order, but demonstrates a certain restlessness, and the gun-for-hire nature of academic near-employment twinned with necessary ...”

“... It became clear that Groningen, the world’s second largest gas field, stretched far out into the North Sea and geologists noticed that the strata in which the Dutch deposits were found were actually an undersea extension of a formation which began in Yorkshire. Oil companies began to search the sea and quickly found several sedimentary basins of the sort ...”

“... We have all been told about the demographic shift in the United States from the North-East to the Sun Belt of the South-West; and the commentators on politics have been eager to explain that among the consequences of this shift is the Reagan Presidency. But our perception of US life and letters has not yet been affected; our listening posts on this side of the Atlantic seldom pick up the weak signals from Tucson or Albuquerque, on a wave-band still blanketed by the vociferous transmitters of New York ...”