“... from the lift. When they begin, Butts is living with a lover named Eleanor Rogers but also seeing John Rodker, an aspiring writer who is chiefly known today for his activities as a publisher of deluxe editions: a portfolio of Fifteen Drawings by Wyndham Lewis (1919), Ara Vos Prec by Eliot (1920), and Hugh Selwyn Mauberley (1920) and Cantos 17-27 by Pound ...”

“... called Don Griffin, who, like my father at the time, worked as a guard for British Rail, took offence. Out the Saxon dog went and off down the high street, with my father in hot pursuit, and me in hot pursuit of my father. At the end of the street there was a cemetery. Don leapt over the wall, my father followed, with me bringing up the rear, all ...”

“... All these types dance through the short, catastrophic history of the Company of Scotland, which took a nation’s money to found a colony on the Panama isthmus in 1698 and ended flat bust in 1701. To read about Darien is to feel that, in a deep sense, venture capitalism is incapable of learning from experience. Of course, its technologies in industrial ...”

“... eat like an elephant, work like a dog, and love my Dad and Mum as only their Van Dyke can.’ He took up smoking and sent his younger brother cigarette cards showing uniforms and battles. He revered his captain, ‘an awful sport’ who had won the Military Cross at the First Battle of Ypres. In July he was commissioned into the 3rd Battalion of the Royal ...”

“... the spring of 1919 he moved to Milan to work for Costruzioni Meccaniche Nazionali and in October took part in Italy’s first postwar motor race, the Parma to Poggio di Berceto hill climb. The following month he competed in the Targa Florio in Sicily. A spectator was killed when he ‘inadvertently crossed the finish line’, as Dal Monte puts it, ‘just as ...”

“... including a remarkable feat of railway engineering which linked the port to the new capital. It took 30 years to complete. ‘Between Massawa and Asmara,’ Wrong explains, ‘the land soars from sea level to 2300 metres in just 70 kilometres.’ At its steepest the Eritrean railway touched a gradient of 1 in 28. It is running again today, with steam ...”

“... to go back to Yale, where he moonlighted as a talent-spotter for his old deputy.Angleton took Matthiessen on a drive around Washington and told him that Paris was a plum assignment. Until then Matthiessen hadn’t realised he’d been hired. Three months of stateside training would be necessary. Matthiessen baulked at coming down to Washington ...”

“... an exhilarating place to imagine they’d found it, even though it would soon be in ruins. They took up propaganda work with the Partido Obrero de Unificación Marxista, a not quite Trotskyist party of which Trotsky himself was fiercely critical. The POUM’s members (including a number of its leaders) were drawn from the Left and Right Opposition to the ...”

“... only interest was golf. Having created in Kennedy a glamorous genius, innumerable writers then took pleasure in demonstrating that he was both frivolous and false and in destroying his reputation with gossip. But it can be argued that Kennedy was an able leader, with a fresh and alert mind, who was respected by other world leaders. It is but simple truth ...”

“... principles’. The illustrative quotations reinforced this emphasis: ‘The term Whig,’ Lord John Russell said in the 1850s, ‘has the convenience of expressing in one syllable what Conservative Liberal expresses in seven.’ The entry ranged widely over the (mainly pejorative) extensions of the core use, including such delights, now lost, as ...”

“... then, or at least surrounded me in my own head. Sometimes it surrounds me still. One day, my mum took me into Irvine town centre in the afternoon, Kilwinning is a satellite of Irvine, the main town, as Pennyburn is a satellite of Kilwinning. We came from the station, and she brought me up to some high flats. My eyes were everywhere; the present wasn’t just ...”

“... the FBI does not normally investigate sexual assault cases.) Kavanaugh denies that the incident took place, but – although presumably an advocate of the rule of law – opposes Dr Ford’s request that there should be a further investigation by the FBI as part of its routine background checks for important government nominees. The evangelist Franklin ...”

“... in his seminal study Writing the English Republic, the language of chaos and creation briefly took on optimistic overtones during the Commonwealth, but with its disintegration the images became despairing. The Grand Concernments of England Ensured, an anonymous pamphlet which appeared in 1659, shows that the image of the Commonwealth as being created from ...”

“... more available on tseliot.com, and many thousands yet to come. Edited for the most part by John Haffenden, the edition builds on the collection made by the late Valerie Eliot and on many archives (especially those of Faber). Occasionally, there’s a page with only a couple of lines by Old Possum on it, and about fifty lines of small-print ...”

“... knocking all the bubbles out of my Pepsi.” Beede’s knee instantly stopped its jogging. Kane took a quick swig of the imperilled beverage,’ where ‘imperilled beverage’, a phrase nobody other than Jeeves would ever use, is meant to be bathetically mock-heroic) or effortfully exuberant dialogue: ‘“We Broads got class, yeah? We got breedin’! We ...”