“... power, and still affect me as much as they ever did. I am thinking for example of the poet James Thomson’s lines on the unimaginably vast rivers of South America, not rivers so much as seas, which, bearing ‘the liquid weight of half the globe’, crash muddily into the green Atlantic. I am thinking of favourite walks, or rather favourite places to ...”

“... Explorations (1962). Yeats coined it to praise the philosophy of George Berkeley, the 18th-century bishop of Cloyne (and so a cleric, as well as ‘clerkly’), which Yeats thought had seen off a threat to civilisation no less deadly than that posed to Greece by Xerxes and his men: the enemy for Berkeley, as for Yeats, was not military but intellectual, the ...”

“... sectarian theories and practices.The first issue of Partisan Review included a section from James T. Farrell’s once famous Studs Lonigan trilogy, which relates the young manhood and eventual destruction of a Catholic boy from Chicago, as well as improving tales written in would-be proletarian style. There was an attack on bourgeois literary critics ...”

“... as an Irishman of Southern blood and Northern upbringing, whose father was a Protestant Bishop and also a fervent Home Ruler …’ Longley was born and lived most of his life in Belfast, but his parents were from Clapham Common – ‘old-fashioned Tories’ who never lost their accents. He was, in that sense, a paradoxical creature. ‘Edna and I ...”

“... of it being a first night as that the cast have been doing it on and off now for two years. When James C. drops his head on his desk it’s with an almighty crash and he gets up looking a bit pale, but there are no other slip-ups. The response at the end is tumultuous, the audience (though I think this is nowadays obligatory) rising to their feet en ...”

“... was never again able to find his way into fairyland, but in later life he was quizzed by the bishop of St David’s about his experiences and claimed to be able to remember fragments of the fairies’ language, which according to Gerald resembled Greek. This leads Gerald to the conclusion that fairies were descended from Brutus the Trojan, like the rest ...”

“... this mind are very numerous and apparently diverse, among them Einstein, Darwin, Spengler, William James, as well as writers such as Gertrude Stein, Joyce and Proust, artistic schools such as naturalism and futurism, and cultural phenomena such as the ‘child cult’ exemplified by the regrettable popularity of Charlie Chaplin. The principal villain however ...”

“... having missed only two races, he was back behind the wheel and came fourth at Monza. James Hunt, driving for McLaren, beat him to the championship by a single point. In the last race of the season, in Tokyo in October – the first ever Japanese Grand Prix – Lauda had retired after the first lap. He didn’t want to race on an unfamiliar track ...”

“... important political thinkers do not really belong in this club of international superstars. One, James Madison from Virginia, is more than just a superstar in the United States. He is one of the secular gods of the American Republic, the architect of its Constitution and the author of many of the Federalist Papers written in its defence, including ...”

“... a gallery above, Grave persons frown upon their love; Yonder behind the silken screen Whispers the bishop with the queen. These hold the future tightly reined, It shall be as they have ordained; The bridal bed already made, The crypt also richly arrayed. At her funeral he read a poem, the last in a sequence called ‘Runes’, in which the word ...”

“... Caramanian Exile’ (which draws parallels between the British and Ottoman empires), or James Quinn on the travel memoirs and historical writing of the militant nationalist John Mitchel after he was transported to Bermuda, the reach of the British Empire matters as much as the comparative discussion. But Transitions is traditional in the way it ...”

“... the unquestioning service he performs for Lord Darlington, an aristocratic English Nazi, played by James Fox. ‘Let us make a film in which the representation of fascism would engage with the fascism of representation,’ Rose writes. ‘A film, shall we say, which follows the life story of a member of the SS in all its pathos, so that we empathise with ...”

“... Carter Family, Morton Feldman, Beatrice Lillie (and fairies at the bottom of the garden), Elmore James, Giulio Cesare, Miss Kitty Wells, Vespro della beata vergine, South Pacific, Pet Sounds, Les Négresses Vertes, Dusty in Memphis, Ferrier’s Kindertötenlieder, Toots and the Maytals, Têtes Raides, Lulu, Lulu – even Gurdjieff’s potty piano ...”

“... cope. Karen was born in Beirut and came to the UK when she married a Lebanese man who lived in Bishop’s Stortford. The marriage broke up around 2008 and she took the boys back to Beirut, returning with them to London in 2014 and taking a private rental in Grenfell Tower. It wasn’t easy to pay the rent, given London prices. She could only work 16 hours ...”