“... others, Eric Griffiths. In an essay included in Geoffrey Hill: Essays on his Work (1985, edited by Peter Robinson), Griffiths expressed reservations about Hill’s ‘unsteady reliance on religious metaphors’ in his critical writings. In Hill’s essay ‘Poetry as “Menace” and “Atonement” ’ in particular, the idea that poetic language may escape ...”

“... of T. S. Eliot’s first marriage, to Vivien Haigh-Wood, and I had been pretty well put off it by Peter Redgrove’s letter to the TLS: ‘if Eliot’s diagnosis of the ills of our civilisation in prose and poetry had its root in his own sexual distress and inability in his prime to form a personal relationship with the feminine, then we have a right to ...”

“... the fact that unemployment, the old bugbear of the Chirac years, was going up. During 2009 it rose from 7.8 to 9.6 per cent. More than 2.7 million people were out of work. The figure hasn’t changed much since then. In the first quarter of this year, France posted growth figures of 1 per cent, not as good as Germany’s 1.5 per cent but better than the ...”

“... between himself and Mr Callaghan’s chief whip, Michael Cocks, in the course of which Cocks rose from his chair and looked around the room: There were three doors off it – one into the large Whips’ Office, one into the office of one of his advisers, and one into the corridor to get out. He then secured all three doors. Looking around I could see ...”

“... and a stenographer was hired to record the conversation. But Hutch was a little drunk when he rose to speak, and the stenographer was not used to his vocabulary or odd juxtapositions. The resulting typescript was a disjointed jumble of ideas about sex, men, women, Wobblies, revolution, love, art, democracy and anarchism that lurched between sharp insights ...”

“... work which is offered to him is automatically deprived of the right to receive benefit’ (has Peter Lilley read these letters?). What of the international aspects of Stalin’s Communism? In his Foreword to the English-language edition, Robert Tucker, the American biographer of Stalin, argues that the letters ‘bear out the proposition ... that Stalin ...”

“... Cinderella, Bo Peep and Berie sneak off for a smoke in the alley between Hickory Dickory Dock and Peter Pumpkin Eater’s Pumpkin. Neither children nor adults, they are about to learn that story-land is a sad and gory land, and they deride the credulity of children who think otherwise. To the little girl who keeps stroking her glitter and asking for the ...”

“... brought the mills of Lancashire to a halt for the best part of two years. As monumental New Delhi rose in Lutyens’s imperial splendour, Anglo-Indians anxiously decamped to the suburbs of London. The fate of the Empire mirrored the fate of the treaties. Despite the impressive appearance of permanence, every one of the major buttresses of that high-vaulted ...”

“... diaries to be published and promised that they would be ‘frank’. The world’s press rose to the bait, expecting another instalment of Hollywood-Babylon: ‘Private Lives of Stars Laid Bare in Diaries,’ the Telegraph forecast. Prudently, Isherwood had destroyed the journals that would have interested posterity most: the record of his life ...”

“... lines distributed among ten stanzas – the sort of poetry mathematics of which Peter Reading, an admirer of Armitage’s work, is master), but altogether another to write 1000 lines to a year-end deadline, not least when attempting an essentially public poem which reflects on our times and recollects some recent headline-grabbing ...”

“... Chargaff, Jacob Bronowski, Gunther Stent, Brian Petley, and the trio of Richard Lewontin, Steven Rose and Leon Kamin. In a modest ‘anti-Sokal’ hoax, one of the contributors to The One Culture?, Steven Shapin, leads the reader initially to assume that the quotations come from critics of science in the arts and humanities wing of C.P. Snow’s Two ...”

“... with it.’ ‘Mrs Oakeshott had a thick, coiled plait of strawberry-blonde hair, golden, creamy, rose-tinged. She had a fine face, square in shape, placid but watchful, and a delightful smile.’ Whenever a detail could be selected at the expense of another one, Byatt will always prefer to buy both, and include the receipts: ‘Art Nouveau, the New Art, was ...”

“... and learned to draw, and through another of the floating population at his parents’ home met Peter Watson. In Watson, the heir to the Maypole Dairy Company fortune, and founder with Cyril Connolly and Stephen Spender of Horizon, Craxton found a friend, an indulgent patron and a way into the avant-garde. He had a narrow brush with conscription, from which ...”

“... course, which was a burden on everybody, despite the cartoons and all that guff, the play starring Peter O’Toole. Bernard was a nasty, jealous misogynist who found a perfect safe house at the Colony: so many of its regulars were nasty that your average woman-hater struggled to stand out. (He was also a ponce who stole people’s returns from the betting ...”

“... figures to lend him a cloak of respectability. Figures such as Haines, Bernard Donoughue and Peter Jay, the former British ambassador in Washington – some of the stars of the Labour governments of the 1970s – were happy to be signed up to Maxwell’s payroll. The case of Haines was especially striking: when Maxwell bought the Mirror, in 1984, Haines ...”