“... stands like a lonely beacon on the North Sea: Isolate city spread alongside water, Posted with white towers, she keeps her face Half-turned to Europe, lonely northern daughter, Holding through centuries her separate place. Although Hull’s first poet is perhaps the most celebrated political poet in English, it seems as hard for posterity to place him as ...”

“... reveals herself as plump and well-fed, possibly pregnant. She hangs around for a bit, shoving her white nose through the trellis on top of the wall before disappearing next door. Meanwhile the wreath-laying has started, which I’m always impressed by. In the unlikely event of my being asked to lay a wreath at the Cenotaph I’d have to decline, if only ...”

“... a series made for BBC2 in collaboration with Mike Dibb and others, and intended as a riposte to Kenneth Clarke’s Civilisation.In many ways the BBC series was directly inspired by Benjamin’s essay, ‘The Work of Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction’, particularly in its emphasis on photography as the upstart young rival of painting, the product ...”

“... the floor of a Dominican church. Among the gravestones was a particularly striking one in grey-white marble with pink and blue veins. Two helmets with slits for eyes faced each other, like a pair of beaky dolphins about, clangingly, to kiss: ‘Tomb Slab of an English Couple’, the label in Istanbul’s Archaeological Museum says. The couple were ...”

“... of acquaintance, including with the Australian painter Roy de Maistre. In his memoir, Patrick White remembers de Maistre as ‘a snob’ who ‘enjoyed a princess’:In Eccleston Street, in the de Maistre studio-salon, I met other more or less important people, among them Henry Moore, Graham Sutherland, Francis Bacon, as well as Douglas Cooper … I got ...”

“... Beyond the Fringe, which he thought ‘rather dreary’. I never could think of much to say to Kenneth Tynan or he to me but whenever we met in the early 1960s he’d make a point of telling me that of all the stuff in BTF what ‘Truman’ had most liked was the sermon, I think because it reminded him of the sermons of his boyhood. Whether Tynan was just ...”

“... because of the captive audience. Having had his right leg specially immobilised in a large white plaster cast (the immense trouble he will take to get an effect has been a trademark throughout his career), he would sit in a crowded railway carriage with the glaringly encased leg sticking out into the aisle until everyone on board was aware of nothing ...”

“... discovery of the Romantic poets continues to be made. What Coleridge put in a notebook – the white dung of a hawk falling from the sky, the shadows cast on urine by candlelight – could and can go into poetry, along with the wasp trying to get out of the window, a menstrual problem, buying veal, what a husband thought the wife said, what she felt he ...”

“... film addresses the Allied invasion of Normandy in 1944 and – perhaps more obliquely – Kenneth Branagh’s film engages with the current carnage of Belfast.In the 18th century an early shift of emphasis from performance to print led to Shakespeare’s becoming irrevocably woven into the strands of a national literary culture, first through ...”

“... an equation accepted by many homosexuals of the generation of Burgess’s octogenarian narrator, Kenneth Toomey. Terrence Rattigan was surprised to find during war service that he was brave in an ordinary way. Out of this realisation came his interest in such non-cowardly homosexuals as T.E. Lawrence (Ross) and Alexander the Great (Adventure Story). But ...”

“... servant John Vassall as a Soviet agent and illustrated with a photo of him lying on his bed in white underpants, ‘a spy and homo – a gilt-edged specimen of his type’. This gay-basher’s guide to ‘THE CRAWLER’, ‘THE FUSSY DRESSER’ etc sums up and hopes to activate prejudice, but is perhaps less revealing than the Daily Herald’s ‘What I ...”

“... more than $500 billion (almost twice the GDP of sub-Saharan Africa), have scaled the walls of the White House. In a bullish five years in the 1990s as CEO of Halliburton, the world’s largest oil and gas services company, Dick Cheney drew $44 million in salary from an outfit that on his own Brechtian admission saw war as offering ‘growth ...”

“... of Israeli policy, a letter signed by seventy, eighty or even ninety senators is dispatched to the White House warning him that Israel must be fully sustained. Mahmoud Riad, a skilled, tough and likeable soldier turned diplomat, was Egyptian Foreign Minister from 1964 to 1972 under both Nasser and Sadat, and he was then Secretary-General of the Arab League ...”

“... of what a writer is and how a writer works, on the order of expecting Herman Melville to be a white whale’. But it might be more accurate, given the clear connections between Jackson’s life and her work, to call it a misunderstanding of what it was (or is) to be a wife and mother. Jackson once said that all her books ‘laid end to end would be one ...”

“... an individual will. Thus, the significances divined by Wordsworth in, say, a ruined cottage or the white doe of Rylstone or by the infant James in a Paris street scene are not merely ascribed to things or places. Rather, they are discovered also to be there already, already existent, a sort of afterglow or mark left behind by one’s ancestors. It is as if, to ...”