“... owned by some individuals without apparently realising that 70 thousand acres of hill and peat moss may not be very profitable investments. The book is more convincing on the concentrations of business power in London, a feature well established since the mid-19th century, and on the well-known system of media chains of ownership. ‘Wealth is very ...”

“... her Hair, though naturally fine, being quite matted ... seemed to be a Composition of raw Silk and Moss, such as I remember to have stolen a Lock of from the Head of Good Duke Humphry, at St Albans, three hundred Years after his Death. This has the poetic touch of the Augustan age in its evocation of the sensuously disgusting; the hair becomes a subject in ...”

“... throwing one of the letters into the garden her family shared with their neighbours. Gladys Moss, the policewoman, was keeping watch on Swan through a slit in a garden shed when she saw her throw a folded piece of buff-coloured paper in the direction of the Mays’ house. The paper was addressed to ‘fucking old whore May, 49, Western Rd, Local’. As ...”

“... the state, but in 1988, she appeared as a witness at the trial of Mosiuoa Lekota, Popo Molefe and Moss Chikane, stating under cross-examination – and to gasps from the gallery – that she supported Umkhonto we Sizwe, the ANC’s armed wing. Terrorism was, she wrote in a 1960s essay called ‘The Price of a White Man’s Country’, the ‘deadly logical ...”

“... had those teachers been in a position to quote what Geoffrey Grigson wrote four decades later, in Stephen Spender’s volume of memorial tributes. There, talking about the first poem of Auden’s which he had encountered, one never to be republished, Grigson spoke of its having arisen out of an ‘Englishness’ until then unexpressed or not isolated in a ...”

“... a hanging pot and an open roof. The roof sweeps low, skirted with pinkish-red tiles and clumps of moss. Snyder is in no hurry to move inside. There are other buildings, barns, meditation halls, stretching back further into the woods. As Peter Coyote notes, when you intrude on this place, and on the writer’s day, you should know what you want. ‘I remember ...”

“... think continually of those who were truly great’ mode. Frank Kermode once said of him: ‘Stephen never knows where he’s going but he knows the best way to get there.’HEANEY: Those books in the middle years, about modernism and so on, I read them with pleasure.The wine was described as ‘cheerful’; the late Alan Sillitoe was described as a ...”