“... evening lately I saw the old lady sitting at her window, facing west, or rather, facing the west wall of her room. Her hair is completely white. She was reading what appeared to be a letter, holding it at an angle in front of her as you would a newspaper. It was one of those lucky evenings when the white summer day turns to amber before it begins to break up ...”

“... that his daughter Sara had followed him into hypochondria and drug addiction. As Rosemary Ashton, Richard Holmes and Morton Paley remind us, Coleridge did survive the long years of estrangement, both from Wordsworth and from all he had ceded to Wordsworth; he did begin to return to himself. When the current of critical opinion reversed, he found himself the ...”

“... Between​ the wars, the journalist Richard Usborne recalled in 1953, there was a feeling that John Buchan was good for you. ‘If not exactly the author set for homework, Buchan was certainly strongly recommended to the schoolboy by parent, uncle, guardian, pastor and master,’ he wrote in Clubland Heroes, a study of the thrillers he had enjoyed as a child ...”

“... in reductio ad Hitlerum as he bears witness to what’s going on in the megachurches: viewers of Richard Dawkins’s documentary The Root of All Evil? might remember his opening salvo against a pre-scandal Ted Haggard, in which Dawkins said that a New Life Church service reminded him of the Nuremberg rallies. (Haggard eventually chased Dawkins out of the ...”

“... most delightful melodies and attracting composers from Mozart and Beethoven to Saint-Saëns and Richard Strauss to write music for the instrument. I once heard Bruno Hoffmann, the most celebrated modern exponent, play his version of Franklin’s glass armonica. The sound was unforgettable – piercing, melancholy, otherworldly. And we have not mentioned the ...”

“... window by Hans Gottfried von Stockhausen which dominates, and virtually forms, the south wall. It depicts, in quasi-abstract terms, the escape of the Israelites from nameless persecution, and the miraculous parting of the waves that allows them to cross a hostile sea in a procession so formed as to suggest, alternatively, the Ark and Jonah’s ...”

“... turns into Comrade Orwell in the Eighties,’ as he puts it. Orwell went through the lackey of Wall Street phrase to the discovery that Nineteen Eighty-Four was really an attack on the United States and the FBI, and that Orwell himself was a good fellow who ‘shared dry crusts with the clochards of Paris’. The present situation, as described by ...”

“... the street. Two young boys ran up the stairs. ‘Fijate no más!’ One of them pinned me to the wall, the other got my purse. Nothing was in it but loose bills, make-up. Everything else was in a pocket inside my jacket. He hit me.   ‘Let’s fuck her,’ the other one said.   ‘How? You need a dick four feet long.’   ‘Turn her ...”

“... of originals has less to do with literature than with vulgar curiosity. But just as a wall owes much to the builder’s choice of bricks ...’ It’s a pity that Amos has to mumble thus. Of course it is vulgar curiosity that makes us want to know that X is really – or even ‘might well be’ – based on Y, and there is no good reason for this ...”

“... in the desert south of Las Vegas. (‘Boulder, not Hoover,’ I hear him growling.) The geographer Richard Walker and I had been teaching a seminar at Berkeley on ‘consumer society’ and we were ending term with a field trip to Vegas, and wanted Davis to meet us there. He was doubtful, for reasons easily guessed; he only began to soften when he heard that ...”

“... in American Africans in Ghana (2006), visitors or residents included Maya Angelou, Malcolm X, Richard Wright, Martin Luther King, Adam Clayton Powell, George Padmore, C.L.R. James and more. Frantz Fanon wrote much of The Wretched of the Earth in Ghana, and the year before Ali’s visit, W.E.B. DuBois died and was buried in Accra. In February 1964 Cassius ...”

“... such negativity had all but drained away. ‘A new generation of Dadaists has emerged today,’ Richard Hamilton wrote in 1961, ‘but son of Dada is accepted.’ With Jeff Koons, the current maestro of the readymade, whose work is the subject of a retrospective at the Whitney in New York (until 19 October), acceptance has become affirmation, even ...”

“... tried to focus on what she felt she held safely in her grasp: Works about Slow Cars and the Wall, I test myself: Wolf Vostell, Berlin Fever, 1973. A motorised performance piece. Cars in groups of ten driving as slowly as cars can drive along the Wall’s route for half an hour. A protest? The calmest protest.All those ...”

“... the US as a sinister maritime republic with an all-powerful navy (Ahab is a fighting Quaker like Richard Nixon), Marvell hints at what the future may hold for a Commonwealth that has no institutional continuity. The theme of wounded male narcissism – the mower on a hot day mown, self-injured – may be one way of giving imaginative shape to what it feels ...”

“... than even that. Paul Durcan’s Going home to Russia, coming two years after The Berlin Wall Café contains 48 poems; Peter Redgrove’s In the Hall of the Saurians, one year after its predecessor, has 34; Norman MacCaig’s Voice-over, three years on from his Collected Poems, has 58; Cat’s Whisker by Philip Gross (three years on) 41; Jouissance ...”