“... his great eyes without thoughtUnder the shadow of stupid straw-pale locks,That insolent fiend Robert ArtissonTo whom the love-lorn Lady Kyteler broughtBronzed peacock feathers, red combs of her cocks.There is a regular iambic metre hiding in the first line, like a ghost or a well-behaved child, but almost anyone is going to read the initial phrase with ...”

“... heartland of the global American imperium. Except for Jane and Paul Bowles in Morocco, only Robert Stone and Joan Didion suggest themselves, and neither of them is associated closely with any one setting. On the whole, American writers seem convinced that the vital features of their society are most clearly discernible at its centre, even though it is ...”

“... minutiae. In the case of the doctors and researchers working with Aids patients in California, Michael Lesy’s study of death in America, The Forbidden Zone, though not specifically about Aids, has interviews with many of the same individuals as Shilts’s, and is a good deal more perceptive. Shilts’s account has been criticised on several grounds, the ...”

“... of their kind or jewels of their country. Many of them are American: Whitman, Stevens, Ashbery, Robert Lowell, Berryman, Cummings, and I suppose Auden. The English are Larkin and Betjeman. Russians and other foreigners include Pushkin, Blok, Gogol, Akhmatova, Mandelstam, Tsvetaeva, Nabokov, Canetti, Milosz and Popa. The only difference I see between ...”

“... enough from their media involvement at the time – Richard Neville himself, Germaine Greer, Robert Hughes, Charles Shaar Murray. Some people died, but only the famously talented (Hendrix, Joplin, Morrison) stick in the public memory. Most of the freaks, hippies and radicals recognised that youth was just a holiday, and come the end of the summer of love ...”

“... have aliens in and carry endorsements from China Miéville; others are alien-free and endorsed by Robert Macfarlane. He has fans who’ve read all the science fiction but not Climbers (1989), his semi-autobiographical masterpiece about rock climbing in the North of England, and fans who are effusive about Climbers but won’t go near the sci-fi. It’s not ...”

“... thought much the same, it is, in fact, harder to think of an occasion when he was right. As Sir Robert Vansittart, the strongly anti-Nazi head of the Foreign Office in the 1930s put it, ‘Lothian was an incurably superficial Johnny-Know-All.’ In 1938, A.L. Rowse, who knew him at All Souls, went further, pillorying Lothian as ‘Britain’s public enemy ...”

“... shortage of actual instances of articulate unbelief. This intriguing paradox lies at the heart of Michael Hunter’s book, which combines lightly revised versions of his previously published essays with newly written chapters to advance a distinctive argument about the significance of atheism in England and Scotland before the Enlightenment. Building on his ...”

“... The Peter Wright trial in Australia has recently brought out the full absurdity of this, with Sir Robert Armstrong attempting at one point to suggest that the very existence of MI5 and MI6 (let alone the identity of their directors) was a secret which could neither be confirmed nor denied. There is no other state in the world which behaves like this and ...”

“... and drove him to fits of remorse. ‘I hope a letter is not too melodramatic,’ he writes to Michael and Edna Longley, after a perceived early failure to be an advocate for poetry in the North: ‘It is not so much in the hope of redressing any hurt as to allay my own embarrassment and guilt. As usual your attitude has been gracious and gentle in the ...”

“... can be surmised for the romantic socialism of Aneurin Bevan, and for the romantic sociology of Michael Young and Raymond Williams, as the views of these three have been characterised. One of the best sayings culled for the new volume is drawn from Bevan, and is as good as the ‘poetry’ heard by someone in his speeches. ‘Lazy? Lazy?’ Bevan responded ...”

“... threatening to turn even Gandhi into an also-ran. Meanwhile, he makes a cameo appearance in Michael Dobbs’s new Good-fellowe thriller, which revolves around the hunt for his next incarnation in London. The Chinese villains are as dastardly as one might wish from HarperCollins, as sinister as the Manchu embassy officials who in 1896 kidnapped the ...”

“... tenderness and outrageous inventions. Hagiographical prefaces to his books by Allen Ginsberg and Robert Creeley align him with Hart Crane and Keats as a poet vulnerable to the world and prone to self-destruction. Wieners himself remembered taking the ferry to Provincetown with Frank O’Hara: ‘We stood again below deck by the hectic Atlantic cutting at our ...”

“... people; the medics in Kiev and Moscow Hospital 6 who attended the injured and irradiated; and Dr Robert Gale, the American surgeon who joined them. You have Mikhail Gorbachev, the charismatic, controversial Soviet leader, castigated for remaining silent from 26 April to 14 May, who nevertheless seized on the Chernobyl accident to add powerful impetus to his ...”

“... The main vehicle for all of this was the Congress for Cultural Freedom, ‘run by CIA agent Michael Josselson from 1950 till 1967’. My first encounter (pun unintended) with the Congress was through The God that Failed, a compendium of confessions by well-known former Communists (and/or sympathisers) that included Gide, Silone and Koestler; it was ...”