“... and the powerful oratorical passage on the death of Jo, ending, ‘And dying thus around us every day,’ might have been used to separate those who sneer at any vigorous specimen of eloquence from those who know good rhetoric from bad: but Vickers does not do so. He does, however, cite the hell-fire sermon from Joyce’s Portrait, where oratory, frankly ...”

“... judges offering superlatives on the jacket of Hugo Williams’s Collected Poems – Edna Longley, Douglas Dunn and Peter Porter – none is English. And yet Williams, born in Windsor during World War Two, the son of the English actor Hugh Williams, schooled by Life and Eton, a youthful toiler for Alan Ross’s London Magazine, an erstwhile globetrotter and a ...”

“... used it to demonstrate a completely different ideology from that of the present government. Douglas Hurd, the last effective home secretary, made little attempt to exploit the Home Office for electoral mobilisation. The rot began with Michael Howard, who was resolute in his attempt to make Labour appear ‘soft’ on crime, immigration etc. In their ...”

“... Raphael gets around to a little scepticism about the word ‘genius’, but rather late in the day, on page 158 to be precise. He is convinced Kubrick is a great director, but doesn’t do much to show us why, and while his epigrammatic analyses of Kubrick’s character are clever and plausible, they have the air of self-contained fictions, unruffled by ...”

“... elements and its ‘Catholic complexion’, ignoring a great number of inconvenient facts. Douglas Hyde, a Protestant and the founder of the Gaelic League, receives two sentences. The contributions of Alice Milligan, W.B. Yeats, Lady Gregory and Constance Markievicz are ignored, presumably because they too were Protestants. So are the contributions of ...”

“... be said for holding a political party together. This puritanical approach to the nitty-gritty of day-to-day politics begins to set the teeth on edge when Owen condemns Wilson for being obsessed with plots against him, on almost the same page as he reveals how deeply he himself was involved in those all too real plots. Even ...”

“... British Empire seemed at its zenith and Kipling and Newbolt were the most flourishing poets of the day. After ‘much falling’, Lionel Johnson had made his legendary descent to death from a bar stool, and Yeats’s other companions were no longer to be found in the Cheshire Cheese. The ‘Nineties’ were well over; Ezra Pound had not yet arrived in ...”

“... but both men compel all around them to react to their idle remarks, mistakes and fantasies. On the day President Macron visited Britain, to take just one recent example, Johnson declared that he wanted to build a bridge across the Channel, and that became the headline. Trump and Johnson are ‘real-time’ politicians: they dominate the rolling news cycle, and ...”

“... eventually committed suicide. Nancy adored him and he her, and they telephoned each other every day. Nancy and Phyllis also adored one another and were heartbroken when Phyllis had to go back to Reggie in the States. But in due course she, too, got a divorce, and then she was back with Nancy and the Pytchley, and in love with the Hon. Henry ...”

“... setting, and in the early autumn of 1832 Pickersgill made the journey to Rydal Mount. During the day the poet would sit for the painter beneath an open skylight in the high garret of the house. When the light failed the two men turned to talking and walking in the garden. One evening, just after the sun had set, something flashed across the sky and fell into ...”

“... a hotel, to the great annoyance of the management.’ They travel to Normandy to see where Keith Douglas was shelled as he stood beside his tank. They prowl around Roundhay Park in Leeds, where John Riley was mugged and beaten to death in the wee hours after drinking at a pub. They also go to predictable and even boring places: Wallace Stevens’s house (he ...”

“... India and China – stepped up their purchases. By August, Russia was making up to $800 million a day from oil and gas, muffling the impact of Western sanctions. Yet while in the short term the surge in oil prices has benefited Russia, in the long run its prospects as an energy exporter look less solid. Last year, the EU imported 40 per cent of its natural ...”

“... of critical-interpretative means. The more so when they are the work of poet-scholars such as C. Day-Lewis and Robert Fitzgerald or of so remarkable a stylist as Jackson Knight (time and again, one finds oneself reverting to his lapidary, taut prose-version when trying to get the original into focus). It is hoped, says the editor, that this assemblage ...”

“... of criminal justice histories much more sceptical and critical than the first. Writers such as Douglas Hay, E.P. Thompson, Michael Ignatieff, and especially Michel Foucault, retold the story in a much more analytical and sophisticated way, showing how criminal justice developments were tied into wider social movements such as the rise of capitalism, the ...”

“... robustly moralistic William Haley, the rather prissy William Rees-Mogg, or the crusading Charles Douglas-Home. Paul Dacre, on the other hand, isn’t just ‘rather different’ from these three. He is entirely different, belonging to a category of journalism quite distinct from theirs. Not only is it tabloid in the sense of being aimed at a mass ...”