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“... 1895 were busy for Oscar Wilde. In late January he was in Algiers with Alfred Douglas. He wrote to Robert Ross: ‘There is a great deal of beauty here. The Kabyle boys are quite lovely. At first we had some difficulty procuring a proper civilised guide. But now it is all right and Bosie and I have taken to haschish: it is quite exquisite: three puffs of smoke ...”

“... Talou, for instance – originally Bangoja – is presented in the early drafts as a stereotypical savage chieftain. When one of the European artistes appears riding a bicycle and brandishing a racket in each hand, with which he bats four shuttlecocks in the air, Bangoja interrupts and attempts the feat himself, only to fall sprawling in the dirt. Talou is a ...”

“... the enthusiasm of the headmaster. But there is every difference here between the author of The Savage God and the author of the recent sober and scholarly study of the Movement poets. Blake Morrison, and his co-editor Andrew Motion, are well aware that ‘in the face of manifesto-making a degree of scepticism is only proper’; and they are careful neither ...”

“... name is one with glory’. Surely, in his own country, he wouldn’t permit the ‘savage destruction of a small unoffending Jewish family’. Eisenhower might indeed have preferred to save her – ‘it goes against the grain to avoid interfering in the case where a woman is to receive capital punishment,’ he told his son – but he feared ...”

“... subsequent books had been well received, but it was North that really established him: it prompted Robert Lowell to declare him the best Irish poet since Yeats, and he was widely celebrated by the London reviewers, who seemed on the whole untroubled by the suggestion that the Irish might be constitutionally disposed to killing one another. Heaney didn’t ...”

“... lift each other in a tentative balance, was advanced both in Heaney’s contribution to Homage to Robert Frost (which he published in 1997 with Joseph Brodsky and Derek Walcott) and in such poems as ‘Weighing In’ and ‘The Swing’ (an Ulster version of Frost’s ‘Birches’) in The Spirit Level (1996), the most recent book of his excerpted for Opened ...”

“... recast herself as the global champion of Willkommenskultur. The backlash from the right was savage. Merkel was made the object of often obscene nationalist vilification. There is no consensus about what happened behind the scenes in September 2015. The most compelling account is Die Getriebenen by Robin Alexander, a correspondent for the conservative ...”

“... with silent ones of homely hue. Huge flies, ignorant of larders and wire-netting, and quite in a savage state, buzzed about him without knowing that he was a man. In and out of the fern-dells snakes glided in their most brilliant blue and yellow guise, it being the season immediately following the shedding of their old skins, when their colours are ...”

“... Tory-led ministry seized on Swift’s talents. Suddenly he found himself the man of the moment. Robert Harley, the chancellor of the exchequer, employed him to write anonymously for the Examiner, a newspaper that spearheaded the government’s causes and attacked its enemies. Formally, Swift had switched sides and crossed party lines, but privately he had ...”

“... the deepest parts of the self. ‘Do you know what gives me no peace nowadays?’ she wrote to Robert Seidel in 1898: the fact that people, ‘when they are writing, forget for the most part to go deeper inside themselves’. ‘I hereby vow,’ she continued, ‘never to forget when I am writing … to go inside myself.’ She was talking about the ...”

“... makes the scene even more touching. 6 February. I am reading a history of the Yorkshire Dales by Robert White, one of a series, Landscape through Time, published by English Heritage. During the enclosures of the 18th and 19th centuries, most of the land enclosed was added to existing farms, but in 1809 John Hulton used the land allotted to him from the ...”

“... with some of the older children. In Great Expectations: The Sons and Daughters of Charles Dickens, Robert Gottlieb quotes the letter in which Dickens explains to his wife what happened: ‘Presently, we heard them come back and say to each other with some alarm: “Why, the gate’s shut, and they are all gone!” Ally began in a dismayed way to cry out, but ...”

“... a stivver to poor Eddy, in fact I think he was owed a lot of wages!’ With his mother and her ‘savage loving’ out of the picture, the world he grew up in is apparently less distressing to contemplate (and more available as material for works like All That Fall). The cher maître treatment he gets elsewhere also seems to make him eager to keep up with ...”

“... judges, a backbench MP called Malcolm Craig, shows no overlap with either Hermione Lee (2006) or Robert Macfarlane (2013). The Elysian judges for 2013 are Jo Cross, a columnist whose criterion for imaginative literature is its ‘relevance’; Penny Feathers, retired from the Foreign Office and attempting to write topical thrillers; Tobias Benedict, an ...”

“... Partisan Review, the Kenyon Review and Sewanee Review, with a good deal of auto-canonising. Robert Lowell, almost by default it seemed, was ceded pride of place, the ‘most important American poet now at work’. Lowell and Randall Jarrell, roommates at Kenyon College in the 1930s, and to a lesser extent Berryman too, were big on rating and ...”