“... from a 1940 review of Max Miller at the Holborn Empire, attached as a footnote to ‘The Art of Donald McGill’. The same four-volume collection contains 20 pieces Orwell contributed to newspapers, anthologies and magazines while on the BBC staff, but includes nothing he wrote as a producer except for a couple of letters and memoranda. ‘I am tendering my ...”

“... Annie Dillard (1945-) and Ann Beattie (1947-). Heavy in the hand, the Companion makes for pretty light reading: Joan Didion is helpfully described as the author of ‘nonfictional works on contemporary life’; the ‘Beat movement’ as ‘a bohemian rebellion against established society which came to prominence about 1956’; David Ignatow’s poetic idiom ...”

“... the line of great dead critics – Johnson, Coleridge, Arnold, T.S. Eliot, Trilling and Donald Davie. If, as I believe, this volume does add up to a book, in fact a considerable one, it is artfully shaped as a study of bereavement and of commemoration – not least, as a tribute paid by one of the living to great artists. An essay on Marlowe sets ...”

“... Raiding, they said, was the bedouin national sport, like league football or county cricket.’ (Donald Rumsfeld appears to have taken a similarly sporting attitude to recent looting in Baghdad, although his tolerance would presumably not encompass looting by the poor of presidential palaces and museums in, say, Washington DC.) The British as occupying power ...”

“... benchmark acts as a reference for a different grade and quality of oil. Brent sets the price for light North Sea crude, and since offshore petroleum is easy to transport by ship, it’s the main measure of market prices in many parts of the world. West Texas Intermediate, which is distributed by pipeline across North America, sets the domestic price of oil ...”

“... presumably involved zero actual commuting.) In his 2012 autobiography, Rubio brushed off all this light-fingered expensing as the result of innocent inattention, and announced that he had arranged for all the improper charges to be repaid out of personal funds. But as Chris Ingram, a former Florida Republican political consultant, put it, ‘Marco Rubio has a ...”

“... onto the political stage. Sisi’s ascendancy has intensified this divide, and in the process cast light on the numerous contradictions of a regime attempting to cling to power by retaining the structures of the past but describing them with the vocabulary of the new. The Egyptian parliament’s human rights committee is currently headed by a former police ...”

“... and what do they tell us about what’s now thought of as a ‘quotation’? Might they even cast light on the cultural biases of the Yale Book?The scores reveal implied value judgments aplenty. Don’t buy shares in Tennyson. The 339 quotations in the 1979 Oxford Book were slimmed to 195 in the 2014 edition, but the Yale Book sends them all into the valley ...”

“... Grow Old’ (1945), an airman sees row on row of angelic aeroplanes flying into ‘a bright white light, shining bright and without any colour’ in a story that gives a gritty top-dressing of Hemingway to a wartime visionary mode that anticipates Powell and Pressburger’s A Matter of Life and Death by a couple of years.Dahl’s injuries led to headaches and ...”

“... you must make work or else you blow it. Sincere intent alone is not enough: For though the tone is light, the rules are tough. The last line could be his credo as a poet, but it is possible to read it slightly otherwise than he intends us to. The tough rules are to be used as redemptive agents for the ‘prosaic voice’ he claims is his own true poetic ...”

“... so hate anyone who can.’ Among others who leapt to the defence of culture as they knew it were Donald Hall, Herbert Gold, Delmore Schwartz, Truman Capote (on Kerouac: ‘that’s not writing, that’s type-writing’), Robert Brustein and James Dickey (‘Howl is the skin of Rimbaud’s Une Saison en Enfer thrown over the conventional maunderings of one ...”

“... are the world to us,’ as Shelley once put it. The morning star dwindles in the growing light of day until it is no longer there except as an intuition or perhaps a fiction: Shelley charms the star into what Thomas Hardy – a great admirer though a very different sort of poet – once called ‘existlessness’. And, to add to the sense of ...”

“... advance of Axis guns’, and who ‘from that time on ... could never see Pound in an unambiguous light, or think of him as other than the most problematic of poets’. Morgan goes on to describe his admiration for Pound’s poetry, his liking for the ‘bouncy, unrancid, echt-American Pound’ of Patria Mia, and his repulsion for Pound’s politics: ‘I ...”

“... to sleep’). Writing to friends became one means of doing that talking – and of keeping the light on. The poetry too has the air of something written at night and against night; his first published poem, composed when he was 15, is titled ‘La Noche Triste’. Recalling those formative years on the Derry farm, he said: ‘I always liked to sit up all ...”

“... Hannity, Alex Jones, Josh Hawley, Tom Cotton and ‘the biggest ethnic entrepreneur of all’ – Donald Trump (you imagine he would relish the superlative). Like his counterparts around the world, Trump built a superfaction from sons of the soil who feel downgraded. He ‘put the grievances of white, male, Christian, rural Americans into a simplified ...”