“... and art historian – it is as a sympathetic critic of some of the quieter poets (Clare, Barnes, Christopher Smart) and an acrid critic of many others, including most of his contemporaries, that Grigson is first thought of. Not Mr Grigson the poet, his eye in a fine frenzy rolling, but Mr Grigson the critic, his eye beadily turned on pretension, inflation ...”

“... who, as an undergraduate, climbed onto the Codrington Library and stole the weather vane from the Christopher Wren sundial. When he was elected a fellow, he climbed back up and replaced it. Nobody, as far as he could tell, had noticed its absence.The world is huge up high. I’m not daring in most things – I cross roads at the green man and wear my seatbelt ...”

“... It was an unprecedented achievement. In his exciting but frustrating book on early Modernism, Christopher Butler discusses the Delaunay-Cendrars work in some detail, with-in the context of simultaneism, but does not mention either Duncan Grant or Vanessa Bell at any point (although her husband Clive, a critic rather than an artist, is respectfully ...”

“... I poured itit had a cutting edgeand flamedlike Betelgeuse.I drink to youin smoke-mirled, blue-black,polished sloes, bitterand dependable.In that example, the ‘Sloe Gin’ displays its ‘cutting edge’ between the words ‘bitter’ and ‘dependable’. In ‘Remembering Malibu’, a poem addressed to Brian Moore, he writes of the island monastic site ...”

“... in for a spot of incest and unmarried motherhood – in A Certain Justice we are even given a ‘black smudge of pubic hair’ – but they still feel more at home grousing about the lower orders or condemning as racist the charge that the Metropolitan Police Force is institutionally racist. One might define fiction as the kind of writing in which it is ...”

“... found that even in London, it was a minority sect, at least until the early years of Elizabeth. Christopher Haigh, who describes himself as an ex-Methodist Anglican agnostic, decided that this revisionist band needed a leader, and headed into battle with a stream of publications that came to full fruition in English Reformations: Religion, Politics and ...”

“... face. The rest of Calcutta is impossibly ‘other’, romantically destitute and silent; the ‘black hole’, unsayable. It is interesting that the poor whom Mother Teresa attends never speak. They have no social backgrounds or histories, although it is precisely history and social background, and the shifts within them, that create the poor. Instead of ...”

“... street. They still sell online what the town council has banned them from selling in their shops: black shirts, Fascist banners, statues of the Duce, books and DVDs celebrating his life, and, more disturbing still, manganelli, clubs inscribed with such slogans as molti nemici, molto onore (‘many enemies, much honour’). Every year, on the anniversaries of ...”

“... for we have only to recall Derrida’s elaborate readings of Kafka, Geoffrey Hartman’s of Christopher Smart, or Barbara Johnson’s of Zora Neale Hurston, to see how much analysis of text and modification of the canon have gone into deconstructive theorising. But why should Steiner, who wants to replace commentary with ‘performance answering ...”

“... since the funding of the racket had to be concealed from the Treasury and State Departments, a black economy. The arms dealers, drug smugglers and middlemen of this dirty budget were to furnish most of the ‘colourful characters’, as Americans found to their dismay that shady Persian marchands de tapis knew more about the bowels and intestines of the ...”

“... Certainly the book brings together an impressive variety of background experience. ‘There are black, migrant, lesbian, heterosexual and religious women involved. Some have children, others do not; some are married, others are single. Their ages range from 17 to 75 years old.’ Though presented in the guise of empirical research, as so many detailed ...”

“... and the power-plays: late arrivals for meetings, or the press conference where he brought his black Labrador, Koni, in to sniff at Merkel, even though he and his staff had been warned that she was afraid of dogs. A brief conversation in the car on the way to Tomsk airport in 2006 exposes the tight coils of the autocrat’s thinking: [Putin] pointed to ...”

“... an uncle and a priest (you need to consult the notes to be quite sure that Chekhov thought Father Christopher silly), Yegorushka travels the prairies of Southern Russia, as Chekhov had lately done and as he had done before in his youth. He transfers for a while to a caravan of carters, perched on the loads. The birds and plants of the steppe are observed. A ...”

“... things were not going well at home. Glenconner by now had five children: Charles, Henry, Christopher and the twins May and Amy. Their father found it difficult to be ‘affectionate or tactile’ with them and Glenconner, still following the pattern set in her own family, felt it was more ‘urgent’ to be a wife than a mother. She sent the children ...”

“... Bob Dylan or Cole Porter; to John Cage’s poetry, Ezra Pound’s operas, the compositions of Christopher Fry or Anthony Burgess.) One of the aims of her study is to rescue Gurney’s later work from accusations of madness, and offer it as evidence of his experimental, even modernist, spirit.As a teenager, Gurney was a chorister at Gloucester ...”