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“... The future​ flashed before my eyes in all its pre-ordained banality. Embarrassment, at first, to the exclusion of all other feelings. But embarrassment curled at the edges with a weariness, the sort that comes over you when you are set on a track by something outside your control, and which, although it is not your experience, is so known in all its cultural forms that you could unscrew the cap of the pen in your hand and jot down in the notebook on your lap every single thing that will happen and everything that will be felt for the foreseeable future ...”

“... Gay Wilson Allen to write William James: A Biography, which appeared in 1967). Edel was at first going to produce an edition of Henry James’s letters, but decided to delay for over twenty-five years while he put out his four biographical volumes, edited The Diary of Alice James, and wrote introductions for huge numbers of reissues. By doing so he ...”

“... his life’s work, and Herrick’s pride in his achievement is marked by the fact that this is the first volume in England to refer to a collection of lyric poems as ‘works’. In the heady historicist days of the 1980s Hesperides was seen as a defiant and despairing gesture of royalism. As Herrick urged his mistresses to gather rosebuds, and rejoiced in ...”

“... the pardon itself was a betrayal, a ‘dishonour’, some said. In fact, Dreyfus’s own first impulse was to refuse the offer – ‘the right of the innocent man,’ he wrote, ‘is not clemency but justice’ – but he was persuaded he would be better able to fight for his rehabilitation if he was out of prison. He published the following ...”

“... world’, but he doesn’t, he keeps her imprisoned in his apartment. This doesn’t daunt her at first. She can invent games for that as for any other condition, and for much of the novel she is able to enjoy her own sleek intelligence and sense of control. Even at the end, about to die in a riding accident, she imagines winning a last round against her ...”

“... through the consciously poetical, to the forceful but semantically oblique assertion: But take Ruth who drowned last week. I used to fancy her – now all I think is what water can do, easing off shoes, making light of the dense net of her tights. To hell with out of place! That’s the fucking Thames dribbling down your face! But the deaths of ...”

“... that he will sell his story to a national daily, find a new mistress, perhaps be reunited with his first wife, he goes for an enthusiastic trot down Fleet Street and runs into the path of a speeding van. The plot is intricate, perhaps a little overburdened, as comic plots tend to be, and wrought into a continuous narrative with no chapter divisions to mark the ...”

“... it’). Neither book rewrites the history of postwar poetry, and each seems to accept that for the first three decades a canon is already pretty much shaped. Partly this is because time has done the sifting for them: Sorley MacLean, who Armitage and Crawford make a point of including as if he were on the margin, is far from being a stranger to mainstream ...”

“... and the ‘three parents’ whose times shaped his life. They were Hilde, or Hildegard Pauline Ruth Gerwing, and the two physicists she successively married, who passed information to the Soviets on the atom-bomb project between 1942 and 1945: Berti, or Engelbert Egon August Ernst Broda, and Alan Nunn May, who was sentenced to ten years for it. Broda, who ...”

“... at the culture he eviscerated in his fiction, and his letters become a catalogue of tiny hurts. To Ruth Miller, a former student, apropos a piece in the New York Times by Louis Simpson occasioned by Humboldt’s Gift: It was cheap, mean, it did me dirt … I don’t ask myself why the Times prints such miserable stuff, why I must be called an ingrate, a ...”

“... happens if UK financial regulations diverge from those in the EU. This provokes two uncertainties: first, that the islands will be forced to choose between retaining access to markets in either the UK or the EU; second, that the government will put into action its occasional threats to turn the post-Brexit UK into a floating tax haven if it can’t agree a ...”

“... been toppled after a three-month struggle and in March 1970 the country was in the throes of its first ever general election campaign. I was travelling to every major town and many smaller ones, interviewing opposition politicians and those who’d taken part in the uprising for a book. I was still there in May, my work unfinished, when the invitation ...”

“... and impressively active in determining how she was to be perceived. She got her retaliation in first. She taunted her putative tormentors. She used them to her advantage, whatever that was. It might be seeing off the rugby player Will Carling, a lover she was bored by. Carling’s friend Gary Lineker warned him: ‘That woman is trouble.’ The element of ...”

“... has not simply analysed markets but helped create them, starting in 1972 with the world’s first currency futures exchange, the International Monetary Market. Those influenced by Friedman – most famously the ‘Chicago boys’ in Pinochet’s Chile, but also US, Japanese and British economic policy-makers in the 1980s – reshaped entire national ...”

“... a reading series (a recent phenomenon popularised by Dylan Thomas) and archive. Auden stayed with Ruth Witt-Diamant, the Poetry Center’s founding director, and, in return for his considerable largesse, asked only that he be delivered to gay bars where he might meet young Jewish American males with blond hair. Thom Gunn arrived in the Bay Area that same ...”