“... but her mother was determined she should attend a good secretarial college so that she could go ‘straight into a really high-class post’ – she began as a shorthand typist in a bank in Regent Street. In later life Johnson said that she never doubted ‘that I should have had a fine acting career, if migraines hadn’t stopped me’; this is characteristic ...”

“... more than others of the same size – appalled him.Scenes based on the Signal Hill meetings went straight into the manuscript of Oil! By June 1925, Sinclair was predicting it would be ‘the best thing I have ever done’. The story begins in 1912, when the oil-powered world was still in its infancy. We first encounter our protagonist, thirteen-year-old ...”

“... and drove him to fits of remorse. ‘I hope a letter is not too melodramatic,’ he writes to Michael and Edna Longley, after a perceived early failure to be an advocate for poetry in the North: ‘It is not so much in the hope of redressing any hurt as to allay my own embarrassment and guilt. As usual your attitude has been gracious and gentle in the ...”

“... opera, The Plumber’s Gift. David Malouf has devised a Kipling libretto, Baa Baa Black Sheep, for Michael Berkeley. Blake Morrison is, with the composer Gavin Bryars, engaged on an operatic version of Jules Verne’s story, ‘Dr Ox’s Experiment’. Gavin Ewart has provided saucy verses for Robin Holloway’s opera buffa about sexuality, Boys and Girls Come ...”

“... cheffed [stabbed] for nobody!’ – but was increasingly worried about his older half-brother, Michael, who had ‘been moving a bit mad recently’. Carl went to a community centre in Loughborough Junction where Thapar volunteered; he started getting into trouble after his father walked out, and was later expelled from school.As boys in these ...”

“... At the centre of Michael Cunningham’s new novel, in the second of its three tales, Cat, a black woman police investigator in New York, has the job of receiving and recording the calls of people threatening to blow themselves and others to pieces. Only because these deranged stories have become too familiar does she miss the one who really means it, a young boy, who, without forewarning or apparent motive, goes up to a stranger in Central Park, embraces him and explodes ...”

“... feeling, they wept. Then, last night, the final twist occurred. The tribe fell upon her assailant, Michael Heseltine, and slew him, too.’ But the mere exclusion of Heseltine from the leadership seemed insufficient atonement for the unnatural enormity of matricide. Within the Tory tribe there was to be no healing, no reconciliation, no closure. This was a ...”

“... business serving Hasidic weddings. He arrived in the US from Siberia in 1990, a 22-year-old straight out of university, part of the post-Soviet influx. He spoke fast, driving through Brooklyn with a phone in each hand and answering them on loudspeaker as he talked to me. ‘Americans have lost their way,’ he said. ‘They don’t have the challenges ...”

“... and a voice. The first reading took place at the Six Gallery in San Francisco on 7 October 1955. Michael McClure who also read that night along with Gary Snyder, Philip Whalen and Philip Lamantia, describes the poem’s impact in Scratching the Beat Surface (1982): I hadn’t seen Allen in a few weeks and I had not heard Howl – it was new to me. Allen ...”

“... a lock-in after hours, and we’re not home till three that morning. The phone goes early. It’s Michael Keohane, ringing from Sligo, where he’s president of the Yeats Society. We talk, more about the Middle East than Yeats, and he invites us to the opening of the Yeats Summer School in Sligo that Sunday, and to the party afterwards in Lissadell ...”

“... men for money looks almost virtuous, a way of providing for the children, a twisted return to the straight Puritan path, and this is the dream that is now crumbling for Munny. Killing is just killing, he realises, once you’re sober or able to think about it, once you see the human at the other end of the gun. The reward or the motive doesn’t make any ...”

“... the omission from Mary Queen of Scots: Romance and Nation of most of the 20th century. Lewis cuts straight from Charlotte Yonge to a quick epilogue called ‘Post-Modern Mary’, which barely has time to do more than mention Margaret Drabble’s The Witch of Exmoor (1996), Liz Lochhead’s Mary Queen of Scots Got Her Head Chopped off (1992) and Princess ...”

“... was published, he was aghast at what he had done and warned a susceptible audience not to read it straight, but somehow ‘against the grain’. The poems Rilke wrote in the same period made up the New Poems of 1907 and 1908. Forget the horrid and ubiquitous Letters to a Young Poet, forget Duino, forget The Sonnets to Orpheus. They are for me his greatest ...”

“... like a performer being judged – radiant with nerves. As a diplomat, he is masterly. Faced with a straight question from a BBC interviewer, he speaks fluent fog. You want to coin, in the spirit of admiration, a new verb of speech, ‘to soothe’. As in, the Ambassador’s personal assistant soothed: Indeed, every generation of arts carries with it the ...”

“... rather than a Conservative from the Shires; he’s also said to have voted Green in 2001. Michael Gove, another ally, is not a toff either and would fit in well at a neocon thinktank. With the help of an earlier generation of Tory modernisers, and a core group of Old Etonians and 1990s Central Office staffers, these men have set about giving the party ...”