“... them. I hope you and the kids are keeping well I will be here for some time yet. I will draw to a close sending you and the kids my best love. Michael A thin strip of darkness, the U-boat U.99, commanded by the notorious Kretschmer, cut through the waters off Ireland soon after the last light had gone. It was joined by three other subs, part of the ...”

“... Britain OM, ‘Baron Britain of Aldeburgh’, whose Young Person’s Guide to the Orchestra was as close to state music as a piece not actually the national anthem could be, and which cleverly merged spiky modern fugue with a stately theme from Purcell himself. In the same way, his many songs and adapted folk songs sounded a bit old and a bit new, or a bit ...”

“... of deep archival work. Toiling through mouldy reams of municipal Latin, poring over act books and close rolls, pleas and recognizances, baptisms and burials, borough-mote surveys and consistorial court proceedings, scholars like Urry provide a constant supply of rich contextual trivia, and just occasionally, down some documentary back-way, they stumble upon ...”

“... ever since. I used to see Worsthorne around the place, most usually in El Vino’s either at the close of Fleet Street’s daily business or (much more important to the ethos of the joint) about halfway through it. Here is where he had chummed up with Henry Fairlie, Paul Johnson, George Gale, Kingsley Amis and many of his other life-long boon ...”

“... ten years. Herbert Read was a year his junior. These are all figures with whom he had more or less close connections at one time or another, so the relativities are worth bearing in mind. Aldington’s father was a solicitor ‘at Dover and along the south coast’. Both parents had some claim to be considered writers, the books to their credit or discredit ...”

“... ladies determined to work at the White House. Though she did not live there, she became a close friend and confidante of the President’s wife. Mrs Lincoln’s lasting affection for ‘Lizzie’ is well-documented in her letters to Mrs Keckley, her dearest and, it would seem, only friend, and while Lizzie’s admiration for the petulant, indulged and ...”

“... as ‘painted grenadier-red’. That I.A. Richards should speak with enthusiasm of Forbes, his close friend, the collaborator who in 1919 had persuaded him to give up the notion of becoming a mountain guide on Skye and, instead, lecture for the Cambridge English Tripos, is what one would expect. A rare distinction for a member of the English Faculty is ...”

“... the fact that he was reopening a book which both Churchill and de Valera had decided peaceably to close almost exactly thirty years ago. That at any rate would be the charitable explanation. Within hours of his remarks, the Dail had been adjourned in uproar, the Irish ambassador in London was being told to protest to Whitehall, and the front pages of the ...”

“... it from his book and simply visited Sydney University at night with a spray can. White is direct, frank and unsensational about his homosexuality, which may well be a key to understanding his work and his life. He grew up in a wealthy family, comfortable, accustomed to servants (English and Scots) to whom he felt attached, undisturbed (he says), but ...”

“... genius as lyric poet that engages Foster most deeply. At the heart of Foster’s book is a close reading of a handful of poems (not always the obviously beautiful or famous ones), conducted with an exquisite sense of the way metrical and rhetorical structures embody the shifts and subtleties of thought and feeling. He provides what amounts to a manual ...”

“... even those whose work differed greatly from his own, such as Stephen Crane, Theodore Dreiser and Frank Norris. Yet all of them, with the exception of Crane, ultimately turned on him and dismissed his work. It was inevitable that they should do so. They had learned from Howells himself to describe and defend their own realism by exposing the conventionality ...”

“... philosophy, architecture, mythology and modern art and where Shakespeare rubs shoulders with Frank Lloyd Wright, Nabokov with Aristotle, Newton with Cy Twombly. Fisher takes wonder where he finds it, in the Chicago skyline, Miranda’s exclamations in The Tempest or Descartes’s explanation of the rainbow. Experiences of wonder may be by definition ...”

“... water; or another of a tiny sailing ship floating on a sea of golden hair in meticulous close-up.Equally impressive is Maar’s street photography – a popular mode at the time – which, as Caws points out, ‘combines a strong sense of social justice with an eye for the uncanny’ and for inadvertent humour, as in Barcelona, her photograph of a ...”

“... unassailable classics, Highway 61 Revisited, Blonde on Blonde and Blood on the Tracks, pretty close. Partly the problem seems to have been Dylan’s bewilderment at the opportunities afforded by a modern 32-track studio. In the old days he’d go in with a batch of songs and record them as fast as possible. The solo Another Side of Bob Dylan (1964) was ...”

“... all these sentences could have been written by the same person, the person who wrote ‘Frank drops me off outside the sisters’ flat,’ ‘You could hear the kids yelling in the pool,’ ‘I could hear kids on the waste ground behind me,’ ‘The travel-agent smoked in the empty church’ – first sentences, by different writers, from an ...”