“... be something a little suspect about being so well respected by fellow practitioners: the appeal may not extend to ordinary readers. And this is the danger with the Hoke Moseley books: so little seems to be happening that the straight-ahead pleasures of crime fiction are lost. Crime fiction is so dependent on suspense and momentum that Willeford can seem ...”

“... how he would tell Spender about me when Spender returned to London.’ Plante’s later diaries may tell a different story, but the present selection is full of the kind of youth-mongering that appears to slide naturally into young-fogeyism. You won’t find David and Nikos smoking the hard stuff with Mick and Keith. Plante is living out the fantasy of ...”

“... enough to be used as subjects for an evening’s light entertainment. Bizarre as such a spectacle may seem, it makes sense to think of magazines as characters: like people, they have friends, enemies, social characteristics and guiding motivations (however quixotic). Literary historians these days are discouraged from spending too much time with individual ...”

“... the Dardanelles?’ they used to shout at him whenever he got up in Parliament – though that may have been unfair: most of the government and the high command, including Kitchener, were initially behind him. Kitchener’s reputation ended up pretty battered too, though he was drowned before it became a problem. Gallipoli has become one of those military ...”

“... weakly, four times to the earth (perhaps one of the manacles is hammered into a boulder). Orc may in Blake’s view be essentially Los’s doing, Los’s emanation, but Los may also in some sense – literal or mental – have forged the manacles. The bloody form of revolution may be ...”

“... it clear that he could love women only ‘spirituellement’ and had never desired them. ‘We may take it’, Taylor writes, that this diary entry of Gide’s ‘settles the matter of Proust’s sexuality. Androgynous in his work, like all the greatest novelists – yes, by all means. Bisexual never.’ Taylor is uncompromising here, despite the fact that ...”

“... Augustus – in the battle of Perugia of 41 BC. Propertius chiefly wrote about a mistress – who may have been made up, or a courtesan, or a matron, or a fantasy fusion of all three – called Cynthia. Her name is the first word in the first poem of the first book, which begins ‘Cynthia prima’, ‘Cynthia first’. This ...”

“... in both cases the bombers were shot dead, with no pilgrims killed. People in Baghdad worry that IS may be preparing some spectacular atrocity, like the bomb in a refrigerator truck that blew up in the Karada district of the capital on 3 July 2016, killing 324 people. But the IS-held towns and villages around Baghdad, where suicide bombers used to be trained ...”

“... Leslie Evans. When, in 2017, the Daily Mail ran a front-page photograph of Sturgeon and Theresa May with the headline ‘Never mind Brexit, who won Legs-it!’, May dismissed it as a bit of fun, but a spokesperson for Sturgeon responded: ‘Brexit may risk taking Britain back to the ...”

“... sometime after 14 February 1479, when he dictated his will ‘lying ill in bed’, and before 11 May, when the will was opened and read. He would have been about fifty. In November that year, his widow, Giovanna Cuminella, married a Messinese notary. The San Cassiano altarpiece (1475-76). The Venetian evidence apart, these fragments give little insight ...”

“... housing development; and yet 2 has nothing to do with 1, will not alleviate it in any respect, and may even (if it succeeds in flooding the London market with yet more foreign capital) make 1 worse. There is a total disconnect between what a majority of citizens want – I’m guessing, but London is a city where the majority of people are renters rather than ...”

“... precision that this is only ‘half’ of art; without the counterweight of ‘the eternal’, art may sign away its epic prestige, surrendering its totalising power to what Lukács would later lament as the ‘kaleidoscopic chaos’ of modern narrative impressionism. Ford’s Hardy combines in this way – if complicatedly – the eternal and the modern. The ...”

“... Algiers, where he was talking up bilateral relations in the event of his winning the presidency in May. He also said: ‘Colonisation is a part of French history. It is a crime, a crime against humanity … it belongs to a past that we must face up to, while offering an apology to the people who were on the receiving end.’ His remarks caused a furore in ...”

“... other brother was a staff sergeant in the Marine Corps and served in both Iraq and Afghanistan; he may hate Donald Trump more than any of us. He is the one who will shelter us in the upcoming civil war: he has a stockpile of guns, the ability to kill a deer without crying, and a massive tattoo of the Stars and Stripes wrapped around an M16 on his torso, which ...”

“... right’s a harmless Charybdis!’To surprise, to seize. A young style favours conquest – that may also be what the middle-aged Auden was protesting about. But there’s no doubt that O’Hara’s poetry, rather than wearing out its welcome, has continued to conquer audiences. He’s just about become a cliché: of the insouciantly out gay poet, the ...”