“... a visit to Greenwich fair. On her honeymoon in America, she attended a fancy dress ball at the White House as an Arab maiden with golden coins in her hair. But though she adored the fictional stereotype of the Oriental princess, she disliked the condition of contemporary Algerian women. Her refined Unitarian instincts rebelled against the social and ...”

“... other ‘wet’ challengers from the inside who had been cast aside by Thatcher – Mark Carlisle, Norman St John Stevas, Sir Ian Gilmour – Prior was not made of the stuff to fight the leader of his own party. A mild, bumbling man, he preferred not to step out of line. Michael Heseltine was different. Rich, abrasive and ambitious, Heseltine was fed up with ...”

“... brilliant criminal and the subject of one of the great pieces of modern American writing, Norman Mailer’s The Executioner’s Song. Gilmore forswore further appeals and faced the firing squad wearing his famously indestructible Timex watch: scarcely typical and followed by a mere trickle of other deaths. There were no executions in 1978 or 1980, one ...”

“... Lance Richardson speculates that they may have discussed poetry. Both men were protégés of Norman Holmes Pearson, an instructor in the English department at Yale. Pearson was a correspondent of Ezra Pound and Wallace Stevens as well as F.O. Matthiessen, the Harvard scholar and cousin of his pupil, who had taken his own life earlier in 1950 under a ...”

“... into quiet conversation. Ice-cream kiss of almond blossom, bridal abundance of cherry: pink and white. Yellow pom-poms of japonica, horticultural cheerleaders. In a corner, under a high wall that gives away the previous identity of this public park as a decommissioned energy-generating plant, retired workers sway, stiffly and slowly, in t’ai chi ...”

“... can be divided into three distinct periods: the first period was from their settlement with the Norman Conquest untill their expulsion from England in 1290; the middle period ends with unofficial toleration under Cromwell in 1655, when England was nominally Judenrein, although many individual Jews did make their way there; the last period shows the Jews in ...”

“... wave-line may wait to fall,yet (waiting for its falling)still the wind may take,from off its crest,white flake on flake of foam,that risesseeming to dart and pulseand rend the light,so my mind hesitatesabove the passionquivering yet to break[…]will the sound break at lastas the wave hesitant,or will the whole night passand I lie listening awake?H.D.’s ...”

“... Third Policeman. How far Father Tebbit actually travelled in his quest for employment is unclear. Norman was born in Ponders End and elected to Parliament as the member for Chingford, a distance of about three miles. Ponders End is more of a transport collision than a settlement and nobody needs much political arm-twisting to move on. Probably the best ...”

“... or persuade.’ Hitler was dead, he concluded, but ‘the poison has not disappeared’, and ‘white civilisation … is as responsible for its perversions as for its successes.’Camus used his North American tour to audition ideas he would later develop in L’Homme révolté (The Rebel), a critique of revolutionary violence published in 1951. Speaking ...”

“... made him a lasting poet, as he must have known.The breakthrough begins with his 1949 volume, The White Threshold, and was consolidated in his most famous work, the long poem ‘The Nightfishing’, included in the volume of that title in 1955. Both collections, published by Faber, had been signed up by T.S. Eliot, who would prove a wise and supportive ...”

“... in 1960s London, and his grandfather, Bruno, was one of the principal designers of the White City estate in northern Berlin, one of a cluster of social housing projects from the Weimar era to be given a Unesco World Heritage listing. It is a commonplace that modern architecture in Britain, as an ideology, was an import from interwar Central Europe ...”

“... The novel contains hideous and wholly convincing battle descriptions. We learn the effect of white phosphorus on the human body (the blood boils subcutaneously). Apparently there are problems in conducting a body count after a B-52 raid: many of the corpses are reduced to a mere stain and body parts find their ways to the tops of trees. It is, it ...”

“... of poems by Robert Frost. The text is calm and informative, and quietly redundant – like Norman Mailer’s overwrought rhetoric polyfilling a collection of Marilyn Monroe pin-ups. Guiltily, we thirst for something wilder, more fearful. Though, in fairness, several photographs of forked lightning tongues scribbling electric graffiti above bland ...”

“... Miller was her most famous paramour, there were also encounters with Otto Rank, Antonin Artaud, Norman Bel Geddes (‘the P.T. Barnum of design’), George Barker and innumerable sub-luminaries of the literary world. Like Miller, many of them were supported financially by Nin, or more accurately, by her besotted husband Hugo, who on marrying Anaïs had the ...”

“... Pounds, fortified with chocolate, were climbing the southwest face of Montségur to the white walls that ride its summit like a stone ship’. And all this, Kenner reminds us, without any real hope of recognition from an increasingly philistine culture. By the late Seventies, when the Author lay dead or dying, the Modernist demi-god had dwindled to ...”