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“... was one of the poets who got Pound off the American government’s charges of treason after World War Two. But already in 1913 he sensed that Pound’s approval had ulterior motives, as an unpublished poem lamented: In praising me You were not concerned so much with my desert As with your power That you praised me arbitrarily And took credit to yourself In ...”

“... literature, and had no more than a toehold in what was still a male domain. They were second-class citizens – just like their granddaughters and great granddaughters in the Cambridge of 1928. Not only did those women novelists have to do without men’s advantages, Woolf continued: they had at the same time to write like men, and even – following the ...”

“... in public, took up teaching, fell in love with a pupil, and when the affair was terminated by her class-conscious father, took up religion and philosophy and became a churchgoer. He was jolted out of his self-absorption, according to his mother, by the July Days of 1830: ‘C’est le canon qui l’a guéri,’ she would say. He sketched, but never ...”

“... obsessed shepherd. The decades pass, fortunes fluctuate (Iceland did well out of the First World War, staying neutral and supplying proteins to the combatants), bust follows boom, and we are back where we started. Sheep are a mistake, Bjartur’s neo-feudal neighbour says; foxes are where the action is. It makes Knut Hamsun’s Growth of the Soil look like a ...”

“... not something you can enter and exit every two minutes to check dog videos and the progress of the war in Ukraine. When I click away from a book, I find people on the internet reading books, or at least taking photographs of the covers. You wonder where they get the time.In the spring of 1988, I had an Amstrad 8512 with a slow-blinking green cursor that slowed ...”

“... in the 1330s, but he was also paid for carpentry work. Minstrels serving their princes at times of war might pick up weapons when necessary.In a fascinating section on urban minstrelsy, Rastall (who wrote most of the chapters) draws on records from civic authorities and guilds to describe some of the duties assigned to minstrels employed by towns. They were ...”

“... least in its early seasons, Sex and the City was a comedy in which four single, straight, middle-class white women riffed on urban relationships in groundbreakingly explicit terms, from farting in bed with your lover to circumcision preferences; it didn’t deserve its later reputation as a paean to brand shopping. Eight years after it ended, when HBO ...”

“... we choose not to refer to them, we still drag there with us the cultural impedimenta of our social class, our parents’ lives, our bank balances, our sexual and emotional expectations, our unique biographies – all the bits and pieces of our unique existences.’ In other words, sex, which people pretend to believe is intimate and private, actually has an ...”

“... reality is wider than it is on the domestic front. Putin came to power on the crest of a colonial war. In March 1999, the West launched its attack on Yugoslavia. Planning for the reconquest of Chechnya began that same month, under Yeltsin. In early August, Putin – then head of the FSB – was made prime minister. In the last week of September, invoking ...”

“... North Atlantic trading economy whose long decline, and the consequent sectarian battle for working-class jobs, was the economic basis for the current cycle of the Troubles, dating from the hungry 1960s. The Harland and Wolff shipyard, once the busiest in the world, now refurbishes the odd ferry and tugboat. But Belfast and the North generally seem to have ...”

“... and water people,’ he wrote in the Irish World,I am talking to those who mean fight, who mean war and who know what war is. When an enslaved nation can produce men who are brave and daring enough to risk life and to face death for the mere glory of showing that the national spirit still lives, that nation is not dead ...”

“... us in three earlier books digested into State School (1970) – while he was teaching before the war at the Forest School in Hampshire, an endearing place run by the Order of Woodcraft Chivalry. The pupils’ readiness to move up a class was tested by their ability to swim the Avon fully clothed, write a critique of an ...”

“... Size matters – especially in business. In the quarter-century following the American Civil War, consolidation – in the form of trusts, mergers, monopolies, syndicates and cartels – transformed the US economy, revolutionising transport, communications and industrial production. The industrialists and financiers who shaped the new economy regarded its international ascendancy as natural and inevitable ...”

“... local priest out of the temple at the age of six, nor was he summoned by the Mexican minister of war to lecture generals about tactics and fortifications at the age of II, nor was his family banished from Guanajuato in 1893 for their dangerous progressive views: on the death of a financial patron, they moved to Mexico City, where his parents found new ...”

“... tell your worst enemy. Hide from him in the supermarket. Avoid eye contact. Never go out to war with one; never share his drugs. And never, never kiss a writer. Never kiss one no matter what. At the hard core of American writing this century, these would appear to be the big lessons. And they all crumble down to one thing in the end: never trust a ...”