“... the bus-traveller’s equivalent of the zigzag walk (first left, first right ad infinitum) that Stephen Graham had earlier recommended, in The Gentle Art of Tramping (1926), as a way of manoeuvring the modern city into new patterns of disclosure. Starting at Victoria Coach Station, Goldring boards a bus that is about to depart for Essex, a county he has ...”

“... by the week, his marriage in tatters. He finished a highly psychologised critical biography of Stephen Crane. He replaced Roethke for a term at the University of Washington in Seattle; lectured briefly at the University of Vermont; met Jarrell, without any fur flying. In 1952 he spent the spring term at the University of Cincinnati, a generally successful ...”

“... drivel about Mrs Stone. It is, well, pathetic.’ A month later, he was not pleased by Stephen Spender’s World within World: ‘What a spurious book – him and his homosexual affairs that were only “undertaken in a spirit of opportunism”. I’ll say. Seriously though, it makes me hopping mad.’ Two years later he saw The Confidential Clerk ...”

“... which none of the books mentions. In one of his novels, Patrick O’Brian has his character Stephen Maturin say: ‘Have you ever known a village reputation to be wrong?’ Cherie (I’m going to call her that to avoid confusion with the other Blair) has a village reputation which stresses her ambivalent relationship with fame and her obsession with ...”

“... Watford, a stop on the trail that begins with the selfie queue by J.K. Rowling’s Platform 9¾ at King’s Cross Station, just over the way from St Pancras, where the trains from St Albans pull in to Central London. The big producers and stars fly in for a shoot at the Warner Brothers studio next to the Harry Potter set, but they don’t stay long. Painted on ...”

“... in 1875, and known for his charisma, cunning and strategic skills, was dubbed ‘the uncrowned king of Ireland’. He was brought down in 1890, having been named by William O’Shea as co-respondent in a divorce action, and died the following year.) It didn’t even look as though Sinn Féin had captured the public imagination. In opening his tobacco shop ...”

“... most imposing gentile in all of Bellow’s work, however, is Henderson – the self-exploring rain king who, to restore his psychic health, takes his blunted instincts off to Africa. For Bellow no less than for Appelfeld, the truly ‘earthy soul’ is not the Jew, nor is the search to retrieve primitive energies portrayed as the quest of a Jew. For Bellow no ...”

“... anti-semitism, in that it is cultural rather than racial. Virginia Woolf’s father, Leslie Stephen, once observed that the high priests of 18th-century toleration are united in their hostility to the Jews. The 20th century is shocked by this, but there is a rationale, of sorts. They are against the Jews because they believe the Jews themselves to be ...”

“... attempted to repeal, was passed in the Clinton years following the notorious beating of Rodney King by Los Angeles police officers and was intended to prevent racial profiling by police officers.In the vast bureaucracy of the Department of Health and Human Services, the person in charge of overseeing the pandemic response in its many agencies was, before ...”

“... thrashing the air with white sticks, while failing to land a single blow on a Struwwelpeter clown-king bent on slow-puncture abdication by photo opportunity, a different costume or a different country every night. This man changes the rules of the game if he is in danger of losing a piece. Nothing is true, not now. Horrors, incubated over many years: the ...”

“... Ironically, the House of Commons is one place where the legislation is ineffective. The women Stephen Crabb sent his texts to didn’t work for him, and so wouldn’t be covered; researchers and secretaries, like the woman Mark Garnier sent to the sex shop, work for individual MPs, not for Parliament: if they have a complaint, the Equality Act stipulates ...”

“... knitted yellow stockings, he was always quick-witted, a story-teller, an enchanter. Introducing King George VI to the Snowdon skyline, he pointed to the peak of Cnicht, remarking, ‘That bit there, Your Majesty, is my own’; then, recalling his prior duty to the idea of a Snowdonia National Park, quickly added: ‘but keep it under your Crown.’ Jonah ...”

“... will soon become so. Hill was very taken by the American editor who explained the description of King Offa as ‘overlord of the M5’ in Mercian Hymns as referring to a branch of the British secret service rather than the motorway system. Such contingent stuff enters his poetry with a mordant mischief, as though advertising its transience, a spirit that has ...”

“... of its director in Life, led to an invitation to work for John Huston. He wrote an adaptation of Stephen Crane’s story ‘The Blue Hotel’, which Huston did not use but liked enough to give him another project, The African Queen. Later Agee collaborated with Charles Laughton on the screenplay of Davis Grubb’s extraordinary novel about the discovery of ...”

“... more than a week old. In his book Vertical: The City from Satellites to Bunkers, the geographer Stephen Graham quotes Hito Steyerl, a German video artist: ‘Many contemporary philosophers have pointed out that the present moment is distinguished by a prevailing condition of groundlessness.’* Call it ground-zero vertigo. Non-specific ...”