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“... Nov 8, 2016.’ Music helps and hurts. In a college classroom I played Gil Scott-Heron’s ‘Winter in America’, stirring up my old Nixon-era sense of abjection, and cried in front of my students. Of course, such behaviour makes us eligible for the web-scorn of alt-right triumphalists (‘Anguished by Trump, Lena Dunham Flees to Posh Arizona ...”

“... increasing supply; Joshua Gilpin introduced its use in the US in 1804. And in Paris Nicolas-Louis Robert invented a papermaking machine which, through the use of a conveyor belt, produced not single sheets but a continuous roll: the belt replicated the actions of the vatman and coucher, even the right to left, forward and back shake to distribute the ...”

“... and distinctive talent. Gerard Manley Hopkins thought the author might be Irish, observing to Robert Bridges in 1885 that ‘Field is a common, Michael a very common, Irish name.’ Bradley triumphantly reported that at least one reader was convinced that Field must be ‘a Bristol man’. Privately, the authors called themselves ...”

“... a cake and a Bible to Tehran to discuss an arms-for-hostages trade with the Ayatollah Khomeini. Robert MacNamara went to a briefing on Cuba believing that it was more than likely that he would not live through the weekend. The Central Intelligence Agency was caught, in collusion with the Mafia, plotting to poison Fidel Castro’s cigars. Ronald Reagan’s ...”

“... was relieved that she had chosen a reasonably promising young man whose family he knew. Mosley, Robert Cecil reported to Curzon, was ‘not in the first flight’ but had ‘a good future before him’. He was two years older than Cimmie; very dashing (though Curzon at once remarked on his ‘rather Jewish appearance’), and the youngest MP in the ...”

“... with these two books; even the names of the poets – Charles Tomlinson, or David Gascoyne, or Robert Conquest, or John Holloway, or Christopher Middleton, or Geoffrey Hill – stood for a world that was fully England. Looking at the list of poets was like having one’s Irish nose pushed up against the polished glass of a posh window in some imaginary Big ...”

“... poetry today’ – should have told John Haffenden in an interview for Viewpoints that he found Robert Frost’s fable of imagined unlived lives, ‘The Road Not Taken’, exemplary. If Fenton’s distinction between the narrative kinds is just, so is the note of regret and rebellion that he strikes in the phrase ‘deliberately excluded from ...”

“... a thick, oily and malodorous fog that made it harder for German gunners to find their targets.As Robert Graves, Siegfried Sassoon and other memoirists of the First World War made clear, there was always a radical division between ‘the line’ and ‘behind the line’. The line meant mud, blood, rats, inedible rations and the continuous, unbearable thunder ...”

“... The​ Soft Machine drummer, Robert Wyatt, his Cockney tenor cracking with fervour, once sang:I’m nearly five foot seven tallI like to smoke and drink and ballI’ve got a yellow suit that’s made by Pamand every day I like an egg and some teabut most of all I like to talk about me.The American poet Wallace Stevens liked his tea – he took to it in connoisseurship and prudence, ‘imported tea’ every afternoon, ‘with some little tea wafers’, partly in order to ease himself off martinis (Elsie, his ‘Pam’, disapproved of his drinking) – but otherwise everything is different ...”

“... Donya Feuer. His other important prose work is the collection of essays and reviews that make up Winter Pollen. In the letter to his sister about prose being essential to him, he says that he hopes to write poems quite different from ‘the meanness and deadness of almost all modern English verse’. But he mentions, praises and encourages many poets in ...”

“... In Hans Christian Andersen’s famous tale, Karen, a peasant girl, goes barefoot in summer and in winter wears wooden clogs that rub her feet raw, but the mirror tells her she’s lovely and she thinks that wearing the red shoes will make her feel like a princess. Like selfish Heidi and tomboy Katy, Karen is a mid-19th century girl crippled by egotism. The ...”

“... the country lecturing to local branches of the Historical Association, and could pack a hall on a winter night for a topic like the Congress of Vienna or the Liberal landslide of 1906. The secret was, I think, that he talked about the kind of dry-as-dust history which for generations had bored children in school, but transformed it into a tale of the ...”

“... them in cleaving to the convention of literary tourism exemplified by Dickens, Frances Trollope, Robert Louis Stevenson and dozens of other British writers, for whom democratic, republican America presented an appalling and comic spectacle of unruly manners and institutions. For these, too, were out-and-back narratives: the place from which their authors ...”

“... Was there nobody more interesting? More talented? It’s as though Coleridge had stuck with Robert Southey and never met Wordsworth. Why should a writer such as Flaubert, always so fiercely self-assured in his literary judgments, submit to being guided and corrected by the lesser man? Part of the answer may lie in the fact that their friendship was ...”

“... carefree life of the street children who played cricket the whole day long during the idyllic winter months from November till March. One year, when my parents were abroad, I bunked off school for a week to play with the street teams. It was bliss, even though I wasn’t very good and knew the only reason I had been allowed to play was that I had a new ...”