“... as an inspiration; defensively denounced, but perhaps more important, was Dylan Thomas. Thomas may have looked like an ‘ugly puffy fatso’ when he visited Cambridge during Redgrove’s student days, but he ‘kept visionary poetry alive for me and kept me alive too’. Redgrove’s finest early collection of poems, The Force (1966), has a title surely ...”

“... once the balloon went up,’ he began to take preventative measures with an anti-tank rifle (they may have been the only shots Watt fired ‘in action’). The troops under his command objected to such summary treatment being meted out to the zoo’s two zebras; they were released and followed the retreating soldiers ‘at a wary distance’. One of the ...”

“... from the near town ... And yet this is the poet who quotes with solemn approval: Beauty it may be is the meet of lines, Or careful-spacèd sequences of sound. Well, to be sure: but what happens to ‘the meet of lines’ at ‘wheelbarrow/paths’, and ‘but/out’ and ‘were/barred’? Grigson’s precepts are often admirable, but they are ...”

“... it in that dawn to be reading Tel Quel and watching the signs that led up to les événements of May ’68. Sollers was among the chief theorists of that ‘moment’, along with Barthes and Derrida. It is not hard to see the connection between these essays and a text like Barthes’s S/Z, where the scientistic dream of a structuralist ‘method’ is ...”

“... now if one who comes of the same stock has not a right to give his opinion in such like cases. David Hume liked this story, and in 1741 retold it in his marvellous essay ‘Of the Standard of Taste’, where he wrestled with the question of whether such delicacy of judgment was really possible. Some people doubted any such thing, but he did not. Writing in ...”

“... keys to the safes, so that the most valuable items survived the raid. I reached the museum on 10 May, as part of a National Geographic group of Mesopotamian archaeologists. I was also a member of a Unesco fact-finding team, the rest of whom arrived in Baghdad several days later, having had difficulty getting permission to enter the country at all. In the ...”

“... the heroic challengers of the system who rejected socialism and Soviet values, may find the combination surprising. But both the socialist commitment and the belief in reform were crucial to the collective identity of Zubok’s people. When they lost the first and were disappointed in the second after 1968, the whole imagined community ...”

“... in a flashback), and that, at the time she fixed the books to the ceiling, she was mad. This may or may not be plausible, but it absolves the symbolism from too comfortable a resting place in liberal piety. Qatrina had lost her sanity because of what she’d had to do and suffer under the Taliban: accused of ‘living ...”

“... egotists or – if they are any good in bed – deemed ‘Latin’ lovers. Sex may be enjoyable but it ‘oh, it MUST mean something!’ Promiscuity is morally dangerous; being left ‘on the shelf’ even worse. Marriage is still the ultimate goal: ‘I’d tackle it as a full-time job demanding all my intelligence and wit and charm. I’d ...”

“... Donaldson’s self-effacing prose (so un-Jonsonian a quality) and the quietness of his reasoning may occasionally obscure the novelty and penetration of his narrative, there is no missing the surges of power when he tackles hitherto unyielding biographical mysteries. The reasons for Jonson’s journey to Scotland are one such high point, his appearance ...”

“... a particular basketball shot in order to fulfil his destiny by saving a group of children. It may be that the literary form best suited to dramatising forks in the road, paths taken and not taken, isn’t the novel at all but the short story, with its particular affinity for turning points. Certainly Roald Dahl’s story ‘Genesis and ...”

“... but the end of the Seven Years’ War in 1763 and the huge expansion of Britain’s empire may have made them increasingly visible. The black presence raised questions about what it meant to have such an empire, one composed of peoples of different ethnicities and religious beliefs. A number of cases of enslaved African men and women who had escaped ...”

“... with her grandmother, Picasso offered something she recognised.Gilot moved in with Picasso in May 1946. Soon after they left to spend the summer at Maar’s house in Ménerbes. Gilot had protested – it ‘seemed a strange thing to be doing’ and unpleasant for all involved – but Picasso reasoned that he had bought the house for Maar and so should ...”

“... murderer, Mr Wrong, are sorted out. There’s an Incident at Owl Creek-like ending in which Mary may be executed, or reborn, or returned by time-loop to the novel’s opening situation. Other People, this is to say, does not easily give up its secret – at least not to me. Amis’s cleverness has always been of the kind which makes the clodhopping reader ...”

“... individuals, representatives of their elected and traditional authorities did not take part. In May 2021 an agreement was reached between the two countries. According to the joint declaration, Germany said it was ready to recognise its ‘moral responsibility for the colonisation of Namibia’ and to apologise ‘for the historic developments that led to ...”