“... the course in stars.’ Perloff rightly insists on O’Hara’s early and conscious study – of Williams, Gertrude Stein and the modern French poets. Russians, perhaps, became just as important. ‘A True Account’ is a response to a Mayakovsky poem; O’Hara elsewhere praised Mayakovsky’s verse and saw in himself the Soviet poet’s fragility, writing ...”

“... Brigaders, Trotskyites, Communists, pacifists failed by their tribunals. The playwright David Hare declared recently that working-class conscripts now met ‘the officer class’ for the first time and rebelled; but plenty had met the people issuing orders, at least since Peterloo. Moreover, an Army largely unemployed except in training or retreat ...”

“... pursuit, in either case, is hallucinatory and tantalising. Among the characters are two Americans: David Town, who, we hear much later, used to work for the CIA, and was also, once, the secret lover of Qatrina and Marcus’s daughter, the murdered Zameen; and James Palantine, who’s in the US army. Then there’s Dunia, an Afghani schoolteacher harried by the ...”

“... play. We all have a cup of tea and there’s a lot of laughing, particularly as the actors from David Hare’s The Power of Yes begin to drift out after their matinée. One of them is Simon Williams, a tall distinguished figure, handsome throughout his life just as was his father, whom I remember from a film I saw as a ...”

“... audiences howling into their tumblers for years. To someone like me who grew up thinking Kenneth Williams was the perfect English gentleman (and imagining Russell Harty and Lily Savage to be the perfect Northern blokes), the words of Norman Tebbit are not just mad in the way you’d expect from him, but also profoundly at odds with something outrageously ...”

“... the same from one abbey to the next.2 April, Yorkshire. Come across a thirty-year-old note from David Vaisey, at that time a postgraduate student at Bodley and subsequently its Librarian. The note just has a crudely drawn swastika and the slogan ‘A.L. Raus’.14 April. Pass two slightly cheeky-looking middle-aged businessmen in Hanover Square, one of whom ...”

“... that property was a crime, but sponging and bad landlordship were not. G.M. Trevelyan had a David and Saul relationship of some intensity with his brother Charles, the wenching socialist baronet, who suffered from depression and aristocratic bad temper and wilfulness. If anything could have cured him of progressivism, it would have been the sight of his ...”

“... English poets who had heard rumours of Black Mountain College, read their Pound and William Carlos Williams, cannibalised Donald Allen’s influential anthology, The New American Poetry (1960), but never experienced a prime specimen of this fascinating otherness. Where Dorn was exceptional, as Prynne points out, in a conversation recorded at a reception after ...”

“... Thatcher against a split and erratic Labour Party, with or without Murdoch’s support. Francis Williams, Attlee’s press secretary, concluded that the media have to go with the prevailing mood; they can’t deflect the wagon once it has started rolling, but they can enormously increase its weight and velocity. Price suggests that ‘the fundamentals of ...”

“... black American writer Ta-Nehisi Coates. That would come as news to Cornel West, Thomas Chatterton Williams and Pankaj Mishra, all of whom have publicly criticised Coates’s ideas, from a variety of positions.* He treats Marcel Duchamp, New Labour, Herbert Marcuse and US affirmative action policies as if they are all part of the same continuous trend. More ...”

“... Arthur Mitchell, Alvin Ailey and Katherine Dunham; the musicians Duke Ellington and Marion Williams; the writers Langston Hughes and Amiri Baraka. Senghor’s friend Césaire made an appearance, as did the Barbadian writer George Lamming, the South African writer Keorapetse Kgositsile and singers and dance troupes from Brazil and Trinidad and ...”

“... middle-class undergraduates. Some new arrivals, like Hobsbawm or the working-class Raymond Williams, were ‘alienated and shocked’ by this. Briggs sailed through almost impervious to it all, soon a star in two different college debating societies and drafting a ‘History of Modern Times’ (his first unfinished project). War brought one immense ...”

“... that before being sworn in he had himself anointed with cooking oil in the biblical manner of King David. Ashcroft chose Carl Esbeck, who had directed the Center for Law and Religious Freedom run by the conservative Virginia-based Christian Legal Society, as the first chief of the department’s faith-based office. He named Eric Treene, former litigation ...”

“... Stalinist as no one wants to be the first to stop clapping. Coming out I find myself behind Simon Williams, who has been mentioned by his son as one of Ben’s closest friends and am cheered by the possibility that if Ben could play Ambrose, so could Simon – which happily he does. But ‘lovely Ben’ the overwhelming feeling.24 February. Watching Dad’s ...”

“... far from one-eyed. Initially, the new party, in a semi-formal alliance with the Liberals led by David Steel, enjoyed a heady surge of popularity. A Gallup poll in December 1981 put the Tories on 23 per cent, Labour on 24, and the new Alliance on 51. Jenkins triumphantly re-entered Parliament by winning Glasgow Hillhead in March 1982, but the Alliance’s ...”