“... that Gavin climb into the boot of the car. ‘This time I decided,’ Gavin said, ‘to stay very close to him since it always makes people a bit nervous when they are wielding a gun to have someone that close. When I refused to get into the boot, he said “OK” and took aim at my heart. From the time I used to watch ...”

“... hidden villages, Beckford and more Beckford, England’s highest spire and finest cathedral close, mathematical tiles (bogus bricks) and an abandoned canal that was to have linked Salisbury to Southampton, the Avon to the Test, Wilts to Hants. It’s a measure of Orbach’s curiosity, research and fieldwork that he has found the ruins of this ...”

“... writers at once so lacking in blague and yet so unboring. In substance, many of these poems come close to the sociological, ironically confining themselves to the smaller data of the contemporary. One opens: ‘One Xmas in the High Street’; another: ‘On a wet South Coast night’; a third: ‘Somewhere a bus drives on’; the title-poem invites a ...”

“... the ageing voice of Jack that was never heard. This poem works so well in part because it comes close to the core of the entire book’s power: the speaking of one man in another’s voice which, at best, becomes indistinguishable from his own. Occasionally, writing of ‘a time/ before sex and money/ were a basic right’, Lehmann reminded me of Les ...”

“... argument becomes too obvious for comfort. The formation and function of canons was the subject of Frank Kermode’s Wellek Library lectures, now published as Forms of Attention. The third and concluding lecture is called ‘Disentangling Knowledge from Opinion’. Kermode’s elegant traditionalism allows him to acknowledge the difficulty of distinguishing ...”

“... Segre’s Storia di un Ebreo Fortunato, Memoirs of a Fortunate Jew, has complex resonances. If, as Frank Kermode has recently remarked in this paper, memoirs and confessions are still to some extent separate genres, then it may be said that a conviction of his own good fortune is the distinguishing mark of the memoirist. The memoirs of famous sportsmen, actors ...”

“... what is it for? Why spend billions of euros to smash subatomic particles together? The physicist Frank Wilczek (a colleague of mine at MIT, though we haven’t worked together directly) shared the 2004 Nobel Prize for his contribution to the reigning theory of high-energy physics; his new book gives non-specialist readers a tour of the conceptual ...”

“... space it requires and seems completely at home – as no work ever could in the gallery built by Frank Lloyd Wright for Uncle Solomon’s foundation in New York. After Guggenheim left New York, artists, including several whom she had supported, began to make huge paintings. She did something to encourage this by commissioning a very large Pollock, and the ...”

“... in the Cold War landscape’ as MacMillan claims, but it was hardly the ‘serious and frank exchange of views on Sino-US relations and world affairs’ that would be claimed in the Shanghai Communiqué signed by Nixon and Zhou at the end of the visit. Indeed, its main coinage consisted of banalities tossed like untethered grappling irons between a ...”

“... Darwin to Nietzsche – Marcus was an intellectual hero. Even Bill Clinton claimed (according to Frank McLynn in his new biography) ‘to have read and reread’ the Meditations during his presidency. For most people now, Marcus Aurelius is remembered as the elderly emperor smothered by young Commodus on campaign on the German frontier at the start of the ...”

“... so nice that he’ll always be someone’s boyfriend, so bland that he’ll always be jilted; Frank, the son who leaves his father, the cop who leaves the force, and the man who first leaves Larkin; Blue, the hustler everybody wants who becomes a travelling Aids activist and so earns a place in heaven somewhere between the Archangel Gabriel and Johnny ...”

“... the end of it I had just about lost touch with everyone. Having made paintings which were as close to being edgeless as he could make them, he set about trying to deal with space itself. It was not a question of looking at an object in space, but of becoming aware of a place – a special one, with particular significance. The artist’s role would, in ...”

“... than something to be envied; in the heyday of ‘lean quarterlies and swarthy periodicals’ (Frank O’Hara), the New Yorker was not viewed as a particularly serious publisher of poetry. Appearing there did nothing to contradict Bishop’s self-stylisation as a ‘poet by default’: ‘I’ve always felt that I’ve written poetry more by not writing it ...”

“... president of the European Central Bank’, as Fortune put it, when she said ‘we are not here to close spreads,’ implying the ECB wouldn’t buy Italian government debt. It had the opposite effect from the statement her predecessor, Mario Draghi, made during the financial crisis eight years ago, when he promised the ECB would do ‘whatever it takes’ to ...”

“... girl-on-girl: ‘All three young women at the table watched Ava move towards the bar. Let’s be frank: Ava was wearing boot-cut jeans that afternoon and all three scrutinised and evaluated her arse as she went. Manda was looking for some avenue of criticism; but it was pretty clear there was absolutely none.’ This blokeish ‘frankness’ is also evident ...”