“... Broadway, but he would never act there again. There would be no Hamlet or Lear, no Vanya or James Tyrone. His one shot at Shakespeare was as Antony in Joseph L. Mankiewicz’s film of Julius Caesar (1953), where he amazed many doubters and impressed John Gielgud (his Cassius), by handling the verse as easily as he had muttered and snarled in Streetcar ...”

“... Introducing​ his text of Hamlet in The Riverside Shakespeare, Frank Kermode calls it ‘the first great tragedy Europe had produced for two thousand years’, and adds, as if conceding to the long academic stress on its highly ‘problematic’ character: ‘how Shakespeare came to write it is, of course, a mystery on which it is useless to speculate ...”

“... fringe event of the day, on ‘securing the borders’. I tagged along. On a makeshift stage, James Frayne, a Conservative strategist, was explaining to a full house that Reform’s stance on immigration aligns with public attitudes. In recent YouGov polling, 38 per cent of respondents rated Reform ‘best at handling asylum and ...”

“... and a desperate battle over Sangin in 2013 … attracted little attention’. In 2012, when Frank Ledwidge was researching his book, which tallies the personal and financial cost of Britain’s Helmand campaign, he approached all six ministers who had held the defence portfolio since the start of the operation to ask what they thought its legacy would ...”

“... During the 1980s, a generation of American scholars – Ron Bush, Reed Dasenbrock, Michael Groden, James Longenbach, Lawrence Rainey – set those limits by mapping in great detail the relations between the various literary Modernists and examining the genesis of their major writings. Mutual influence is by no means the sole topic of such enquiries, but it ...”

“... I have never seen Francis Crick in a modest mood.’ Thus James Watson opens his notorious account of the discovery of the structure of DNA which won him, Crick and Maurice Wilkins a Nobel Prize in 1962. Whichever other of Watson’s judgments have been controversial – notably his dismissal of Rosalind Franklin, from whom, courtesy of Wilkins, he and Crick were provided with the crucial X-ray photographs of DNA crystals – his assessment of Crick has scarcely been disputed ...”

“... in the book cover Emerson’s first visit, of nine months, to Europe. Most interesting, to be frank, because he met more interesting people – such as Landor, Coleridge, Wordsworth and, most important, Carlyle (‘Transcendentalism’ really takes off from three essays by Carlyle, as Richardson helpfully describes). Not, you understand, that Emerson was ...”

“... the full picture as he liked to see it. His account is inevitably selective but also surprisingly frank, especially about his own failings. And he is generous, in retrospect, about his various lovers. His passionate relationship with West, for example, descended into fractious bickering long before she finally ended things between them in 1923, and Wells ...”

“... and deviant Elizabeth’s first court favourite, Robert Dudley) all the way, via Swift, to Frank Owen’s Guilty Men, published in 1940. Orwell wrote: ‘A pamphlet is never written primarily to give entertainment or to make money. It is written because there is something that one wants to say now, and because one believes there is no other way of ...”

“... postscript set in Norwich. At a staid University Teachers of English get-together George Steiner, Frank Kermode and Seamus Heaney do their party pieces and a novelist – the author of Doctor Criminale, we must suppose – reads from his upcoming work, ‘whose ending he seems not to know’. The publisher’s blurb laconically informs us that Bradbury lives ...”

“... the cover-up. In February 1973, after his re-election, Nixon fired Helms and replaced him with James Schlesinger. In an initiative to regain public trust as the crisis escalated, Schlesinger announced he was ‘determined that the law shall be respected’ and that anyone aware of illegal CIA activities was obliged to report them. Nixon was finally forced ...”

“... But 16 of Hitler’s former ministers and governors of occupied countries were in Allied hands: Frank, Frick, Funk, Goering, Hess, Kaltenbrunner, Ley, Neurath, Papen, Ribbentrop, Rosenberg, Sauckel, Schacht, Schirach, Seyss-Inquart and Speer. Streicher, who had been in charge of the regime’s most disgusting antisemitic propaganda, was too notorious to ...”

“... said to myself Guillaume it is time that you came’). This trait Apollinaire in turn passed on to Frank O’Hara, who acknowledged the debt in ‘Memorial Day 1950’, in which O’Hara figures himself reading music by the light of ‘Guillaume Apollinaire’s clay candelabra’. Yet a note of uncertainty not really found in the American poets often pervades ...”

“... Padgett once called them) is often vividly captured in I Remember: I remember the first time I met Frank O’Hara. He was walking down Second Avenue. It was a cool early spring evening but he was wearing only a white shirt with the sleeves rolled up to his elbows. And blue jeans. And moccasins. I remember that he seemed very sissy to me. Very ...”

“... leave it for a while to see if it catches a gull’s eye, then put it in the bin. 24 May. Run into Frank Dickens the cartoonist walking down the stalled escalator at Camden Town Tube. Says that in Bristow, his strip in the Standard, he’s about to introduce the concept of Desk Rage, with frenzied attacks on other people in the office. About the same age as ...”