“... or cultivate the young, and he fell in with a new generation of poets in the 1960s, including Robert Duncan and Robert Creeley, but he was not entirely at home with the spirit of the decade, or the radicalism of the New Left. His wonderful letters, in which he thinks on his fingers, clattering away with a freedom that ...”

“... anti-colonial activism angered the Portuguese secret police: he was forced into exile and in May 1960 settled in Conakry, capital of the neighbouring Republic of Guinea, which had become independent from France in 1958. Here, with the blessing of the Guinean president, Ahmed Sékou Touré, Cabral set up the headquarters of the African Party for the ...”

“... universal human rights, the rights of nature, and peace on Earth.’ These transports may seem peculiarly Anglo-Saxon, but there is no shortage of more prosaic equivalents on the Continent. For Germany’s leading philosopher, Jürgen Habermas, Europe has found ‘exemplary solutions’ for two great issues of the age: ‘governance beyond the ...”

“... in what was happening. The heightened images of tension and disruption in her poems of the 1940s may have had other sources too, but the war made its way into the nervous system of her poems indirectly and mysteriously. Robert Lowell was a high-profile conscientious objector, writing to Roosevelt in September 1943 with a ...”

“... He was given a bonus for his tireless work on the campaign.At around this time, he got to know May Murray, who was then 19. She had been trained to sing and play the piano by her aunts, who were well known in Dublin’s musical circles. May’s father disapproved of John Stanislaus, and his mother disapproved of ...”

“... experimentation on primates as part of research aimed at improving the treatment of Parkinson’s may be justified. But he argues that this is not the case for the majority of experiments on animals (he tells us that the scale of animal experimentation is unknown – although known to be vast – because most animals aren’t even counted; the US Animal ...”

“... and the modern political party was his home. Others, like the Italian sociologist Robert Michels, argued further that for the modern politician the political party was a form of social mobility, so that eventually the protection of the party’s bureaucratic structures – the machine – became more important than the interests of the people ...”

“... your word “genius”.’ Joyce was unlikely to be much taken by nature mysticism: what he may have found to admire in Wordsworth was his awareness of the momentousness that can attend the ordinary. Wordsworth could not have written Ulysses, of course, and would not have wished to; but the animating principle of Joyce’s novel, that ordinary events ...”

“... first novel’, adding the characteristic gloss that ‘failure too is a kind of death’ and so may conclude the story of a life as appropriately as one’s last breath. Greene had famously gambled his adolescent life on the odds that one of the five empty chambers of the revolver he held to his head would come up when he pulled the trigger (or so he later ...”

“... have shown that the results more than justify the dangers of this method. At the same time, as Robert Fowler wrote in ‘Herodotus and His Contemporaries’ (1996), he had – in addition to Homer, elegiac and lyric poets and Athenian dramatists to give him patterns of narrative and characterisation – many now largely lost Ionian prose writers, mostly ...”

“... parrrrr la foule’ – ‘carried along by the rushing crowd’). She may be accusing the crowd with her words, but with her body and voice, she is seducing them. When her last word is done, she continues the story with gestures, dancing now, as if doing a mad farandole with the crowd, her eyes half-closed and her feet tapping. The ...”

“... In February, Nato announced it was expanding its deployment in Iraq to four thousand troops. It may be possible to make a cleaner break in Afghanistan. But the Afghan security forces Nato claims to have trained are a shell. The invaders are leaving graves behind but precious little else. The civil war will continue.The​ Ministry of Defence tried to ...”

“... wife, Maurie, complained that she was snubbed by the local gentry. They were Catholic too, which may have been part of it. Both parents seem to have viewed their daughter as an instrument for social improvement – Carrington took refuge from their ambitions in a vivid imaginative world. One of her earliest surviving notebooks, from 1927, when she was ten ...”

“... Casting Against the Part and it’s almost a parlour game; a winning combination would be, say, Robert Morley as Andrew Aguecheek. All of which is to do an injustice to Kenneth More, who was a fine naturalistic actor, and although he had never stepped outside his genial public stereotype, Patrick Garland and I both thought that if he could be persuaded to ...”

“... Gascon, Poulidor le Limousin, Georges Meunier le Pêcheur de Vierzon, and the hope for the future, Robert Alban, is Bamban le Caladois. Regional races, such as Paris-Roubaix, the Tour de I’Ouest or the Tour de I’Avenir, give great scope for local reputations to be displayed and sustained. Dr Holt is right to see the Tour de France, and perhaps cycling in ...”