“... of the doctor holds unquestioned narrative authority here. Stripped of myth, emotion and false hope, ‘death is simply an event in the sequence of nature’s ongoing rhythms.’ These rhythms are modulated by the processes of ageing and by the pathophysiology of particular diseases or injuries – heart disease, stroke, cancer, Aids, Alzheimer’s and ...”

“... Perplexes monarchs. According to Milton’s early biographer, the Irish republican John Toland, Charles II’s Licenser for the Press regarded these lines as subversive, and wanted to suppress the whole poem. Immediately after the passage in which he imagines God hatching the universe out of the abyss, Milton asks: what in me is dark Illumine, what is low ...”

“... minister halfway through a war?’It was not a coup, not even a very British one. But it was, as Charles Moore describes, the result of a very Tory conspiracy. Thatcher fell following the first ballot of a leadership election among Conservative MPs in which she secured more votes than her rival Michael Heseltine but not quite enough to prevent the contest ...”

“... held between poems became intrinsic. The renga recently written by Paz, Roubaud, Sanguineti and Charles Tomlinson are thus suggestive. They explore an aspect of our lyric tradition which the tradition has not taught us to notice. Such exercises will eventually make it possible to see that Shakespeare in his Sonnets is, like Basho, both creator and artful ...”

“... said to his face: ‘It would be a good thing if you were taken and shut away, as was done to Charles the Simple. There are houses with iron bars at Windsor that would be good for imprisoning you securely.’Henry was also affectionate by nature and incurably weepy. He broke down in tears whenever he was saying goodbye to his (far ...”

“... of the Prime Minister’s.’ Stephen is on the Parmenter Committee because his former publisher, Charles Darke, is now a junior minister in the government and a pet concern of the Prime Minister’s. Two years previously, Stephen’s three-year-old daughter Kate was abducted in a supermarket, and he is still in a state of shock. At home, he sits in front of ...”

“... a stable, horizontal one. Riordan’s poem ‘L.S. Lowry’s Man Lying on a Wall’ expresses the hope that this horizontal man does not have to be a corpse (‘I’m asleep, you say, possibly dead’) and also indicates a debt to Michael Longley, who wrote a similar poem about Lowry’s painting. Whereas the vertical man was supposed to carry out dynamic ...”

“... of the Okies come to depart from the facts as historians have now begun to uncover them? As Charles Shindo sees it, the answer lies in the political mismatch between the migrants and those who tried to explain and publicise their predicament in an attempt to remedy it: that is, everyone from the managers of the Farm Security Administration camps to ...”

“... authentic tone of enraptured and impotent yearning. Morton Cohen is, however, at pains to rescue Charles Lutwidge Dodgson (‘Lewis Carroll’) from this galère, and to present him as a well-rounded, sociable man, inspired by deep religious convictions, motivated by generosity and altruism towards his large family of brothers and sisters. His ‘...”

“... at Cambridge or in London. Hesperides may have been put together in a spirit as much of fragile hope as defiance or despair. It was sent to the press in late 1647. One of its latest datable poems was written in August that year, when Charles I was negotiating to make peace with Parliament and was reconstructing a ...”

“... seized the Tower of London, where Richard’s counsellors had sequestered him. But the rebels’ hope lay in the 14-year-old king himself, still too young to be blamed for the misrule and corruption that surrounded him. Richard met with Tyler and his supporters at Smithfield and conceded to all their demands, following a risky plan hatched by his ...”

“... shells and fungi, neatly executed, conventionally arranged in the manner of Dali’). And think of Charles Ryder’s decorations at Brideshead: ‘There was another painted room, outside under pillars – modern work but, if you ask me, the prettiest in the place; it was the signal office and they made absolute hay of it; rather a shame.’ So those doubtless ...”

“... list is far from remote. Indeed it is regrettably relevant. It is Political Violence in Ireland by Charles Townshend. I have been singing Townshend’s praises for years past. I think he is the outstanding authority on a subject of vital importance. His new book presents the essential theme in Irish history ever since the European Revolutions of 1848. The ...”

“... small, it is clearly skewed. Prime ministers who cling on until the very end of their term, in the hope that something will turn up, are obviously in deep trouble (as those three were). Putting off an election until the last moment is a good indication that an election is the last thing you want. Cameron is not in that position: once he had bound himself to a ...”

“... remit. In Thomas Dormandy’s sobering litany, St Teresa of Avila, Philip II of Spain, Charles II and Louis XIV were among millions who died in protracted and unnecessary agony: ‘All were surrounded by the best medical talent of their day. None was offered opium to ease their suffering.’ It was the 19th-century revolution in attitudes to pain ...”