“... off. It’s a good service, a model, with none of the speakers – his two sons, Richard Eyre and Robert Bathurst – outstaying their welcome and Ben vividly recalled.Bathurst is particularly good, reading a Betjeman poem about golf, following it up with a very funny (and almost better) poem in parody by Ben himself. Since I know him chiefly from ...”

“... words to stand out when they appear in the third stanza. A ‘Shroud’ – one of the ‘bird-like’ comforters – lets something fall: it might be a sword, or it might even be a curse or a promise or a prophecy. Instead, it is a bundle of linen, something harmless and domestic. The weak trochaic sound ‘linen’ is soon followed by the stronger ...”

“... that he had to be housed in a derelict tennis court, had torn it from its socket and eaten it); Robert Crabbe had lost several toes, which I did not think too serious until he explained they were required for balance (I understood balance in the negative context of not having enough of it, hence those shameful safety wheels fastened to my bicycle).At some ...”

“... they became ‘short timers’, considered the unluckiest stage, before boarding the Freedom Bird for The World and home. Charlie, in contrast, was in for the duration. That same afternoon I booked at the military section of Tan Son Nhut airport, Aerial Port Nine, for the ominously named War Zone C, where Attleboro, the war’s biggest operation to ...”

“... it; the industrial revolution was a far more gradual affair than the name implies. The historian Robert Brenner argues that England had a head start over its Continental peers in the shift from feudalism to capitalism because, come the Black Death, the elites on either side of the Channel shafted the surviving peasants in different ways. In mainland ...”

“... American mythology the world’s leading neofascist is Vladimir Putin. Thanks to this madman, Robert Reich announced, ‘the world is currently and frighteningly locked in a battle to the death between democracy and authoritarianism.’ Rather than face up to the major global realignment that is underway, with the convergence of Russia, China and ...”