“... his life to maim//Himself somehow for the job,’ he wrote in a posthumous address to the painter Peter Lanyon. Apart from a brief and incongruous spell as an advertising copywriter and the occasional stint on fishing boats, he refused to succumb to the distraction of a day job; he didn’t write reviews or journalism; and as his books of verse were very far ...”

“... to be more Republican or more dispassionately liberal. But he is wary of the charge (reiterated by Peter Porter in his sharp Sunday Telegraph review of Opened Ground) of ‘fetishising ... the local’, and cautious about the indigenous traditions of Irish nationalism, given the evidence that ‘pride in the ethnic and religious heritage can quickly degrade ...”

“... that as you grow older some sense of an accumulating “oeuvre” is unavoidable,’ he told Peter McDonald in an interview, ‘but the very word sounds so pompous – you know, those people who talk about “my work”.’ Still, for all Longley’s likeable unpretentiousness, an oeuvre, with the sustained imaginative integrity that implies, is ...”

“... every appearance of relish. Maybe he did do that in public – the Derek and Clive dialogues with Peter Cook left very little to the imagination, so it’s not unlikely.23 March. Barry Cryer brings a good deal of old-fashioned joy into my life, as I’m sure he does for many others. His phone calls always begin, ‘It’s your stalker,’ after which without ...”

“... have appealed much to Leavis either, but they do offer graphic additional proof in support of Peter Ackroyd’s assertion in his 1984 biography of Eliot that ‘when he allowed his sexuality free access, when he was not struggling with his own demons, it was of a heterosexual kind’: When my tall girl sits astraddle on my lap, She with nothing on and I ...”

“... he did that was new. Sluga tells us that he was the first analytical philosopher, but he is so keen to discover sources for his ideas, and so imprecise at distinguishing one idea from another, that he omits to explain what distinguishes analytical philosophy from that of other schools, or what it was that Frege said that made him the originator of a new ...”

“... religious and philosophical convictions’. (It is little wonder that the Liberal Democrats are so keen on the document, since it is exactly the sort of election manifesto that a lawyer might produce on their behalf.) Even from its Strasbourg base, and qualified though the property right is, the Convention has already exerted a powerful influence on the new ...”

“... of that kind. Despite maudlin attention to her adolescent vulnerability – she is endlessly keen to tell us how gauche she was as a young woman, how lacking in confidence, how unprotected, weak and shy – Mahoney seems unable, after twenty years, to relate the enmity towards Hellman to what was patently a profound sense of being unmothered, un ours mal ...”

“... it could be seen as dishonourable for the king to receive ‘pay’. Indeed, because he seemed too keen to fix tributary obligations, Herodotus says the Persians labelled Darius the ‘commodity trader’: kapelos. Perhaps because of this anxiety, even in the Empire’s last years revenue was partly imagined not as a fee paid in minas and shekels and ...”

“... instincts: ‘You’re a grand girl, Prudence, and I’d like to eat you.’ She seems pretty keen on the idea.Black  Mischief draws on Waugh’s time as a foreign correspondent sent to cover the coronation of Haile Selassie, after which he went on to visit Kenya, Uganda and other places – experiences he wrote up in Remote People, one of several good ...”

“... dwellings: the fire was evidence that regulations were being ignored by a construction industry keen to maximise profit. In August 2016, there was another fire at a tower block in Shepherd’s Bush. The London Fire Brigade wrote to every borough council in May 2017 and told them they needed to re-risk-assess their buildings in the light of the fire, but few ...”

“... courage so that one begins to feel the portrait of Cromwell is as skewed as Robert Bolt’s (or Peter Ackroyd’s) is of More and for the same reason, both men human and therefore venial when embosomed in their respective families. Set against this massive work one’s objections seem petty, and it’s a tribute to the power of the novel that one discusses ...”

“... mostly wind farm or vineyard. At the outer tip of the peninsula, the seventh-century chapel of St-Peter-on-the-Wall, built on the site of a Roman fort, has for company the austere concrete box of a decommissioned power station. The ancient oak trees at Mundon Hall were already beginning to die when Warner first saw them; the trunks still stand in spindly ...”

“... voters; b. heavily represented in certain constituencies, such as the famous Basildon; and c. keen readers of the Sun. On the day of the 1992 general election the Sun ran a headline saying: ‘IF KINNOCK WINS TODAY, WILL THE LAST PERSON TO LEAVE BRITAIN TURN OUT THE LIGHTS.’ After the result it ran another headline saying: ‘IT’S THE SUN WOT WON ...”

“... forgot to acknowledge the ancestral tribe of authors, editors and cartoonists who came before – Peter Arno, Charles Addams, John O’Hara, John Cheever, James Thurber, Dorothy Parker, J.D. Salinger, E.B. White, Katharine White (the Mrs White of his telegram) and the sainted William Maxwell – nor did he pull up the ladder against younger novices coming ...”