“... delicate souls quaveringly sensitive to those around them) that means they can write letters which read as though there isn’t a real human being at the receiving end of them. Spark’s final parenthesis, which says that Barnsley’s ‘excellent’ novels are heavy-handed (he wrote under the pseudonym Gabriel Fielding, since he was distantly related to Henry ...”

“... an underlying story, they have no narrative as such and work as separate units. At worst, they read like a cross between R.D. Laing’s case-notes and Richard Aldington’s Imagism. At best, they have a force and integrity which none of the other poets associated with the Review, and few poets since, have come close to matching. The problem, as Hamilton ...”

“... fury of New Apocalypse. As for the Movement, two of its original New Lines members, Thom Gunn and Donald Davie, went off in directions undreamed of by Robert Conquest and still largely ignored by contemporary British poetry. Looking a little further, we find that Gunn and Davie between them do something that has still not been taken on board in Britain: they ...”

“... seventy-five years. How did it happen? On that question, Lubenow is wisely silent. He quotes Sir Donald MacAlister’s claim that ‘the voice that issues from the hearth-rug on Saturday night has gone through all the earth, its sound to the world’s end. It speaks in Senates though men know it not, it controls principalities and powers, it moulds ...”

“... grown-up woman, over 20, asserting that the excellence of Psmith proves that she is not too old to read the Captain. There is an article by an idealistic boy, called ‘The Aim of Socialism’, which begins: ‘Although Mr Wodehouse’s description of Socialism is justified by the excellent use he makes of it, I fear that it will only increase the delusion ...”

“... the question: ‘Can machines think?’ I heard more about the importance of Bletchley from Donald Michie, Professor of Robotology at Edinburgh University. Three years later I read Angus Calder’s The People’s War, a social history of World War Two, and resolved to write something one day about the war. I come from ...”

“... effective leader of his party and an outstanding prime minister. Having reacted against Ramsay Mac-Donald, the argument runs, Labour stood in need of a personality who would put party above self, and Attlee fitted the bill. Yet in his quiet fashion he was skilful in managing the Party and holding it together. Hence Labour’s victory in the General Election of ...”

“... amongst the crème de la crème of their generation’. (We are duly irritated, but of course we read on.) The three women are Cambridge-educated, professionally active, and in their mid-forties. One is single, one is happily married, and one is on the threshold of marital breakdown at the time when the novel opens. It is the evening of 31 December 1979, and ...”

“... ostensibly looking for stories but mainly just looking’. It’s January 2017, just after Donald Trump’s election, and something’s up. She’s suspicious of Felix, her boyfriend of eighteen months: ‘Felix had revealed himself to be completely unrevealing, insisting over and over as I baited and nagged and implored him to tell me his innermost ...”

“... than the outer one – the second is the one to be found ‘crying in a cocktail glass’, as we read in The Age of Anxiety – and the inner one had a field day when Auden was being rewarded for something. Although he was happy and flattered to return to Oxford to become Professor of Poetry, he had, at the same time, what he called ‘a very unpleasant ...”

“... Raiding, they said, was the bedouin national sport, like league football or county cricket.’ (Donald Rumsfeld appears to have taken a similarly sporting attitude to recent looting in Baghdad, although his tolerance would presumably not encompass looting by the poor of presidential palaces and museums in, say, Washington DC.) The British as occupying power ...”

“... them? The ‘few bad apples’ theory was widely discredited from its very first utterance by Donald Rumsfeld, so it is disheartening to see it replicated in some of the statements still coming from the MoD. But at the other extreme, the idea that a coherent mandate condoning torture runs all the way along the chain of command is also hard to credit, if ...”

“... Cornwell (a.k.a. John le Carré) and Tobias Wolff did. Ackerley’s left two letters, ‘to be read only in the case of my death’, in which he revealed his ‘secret orchard’: the mistress and three daughters he’d been hiding for many years. Ackerley’s first reaction to the duplicity was shock: ‘My relationship with my father was in ruins. I had ...”

“... waterboarded, and on what was gained, would help the US electorate evaluate the promises made by Donald Trump and other Republican candidates to bring waterboarding back. Hayden’s failure even to mention these discrepancies undermines his insistence that the intelligence community can help the public make informed decisions. The different demands of the ...”

“... contemporary thinkers’. Few philosophers would accept this assessment. Rorty was widely read and admired by many, he had a good nose for a controversy and was impressive in oral debate. But his influence on philosophy has, so far, been minimal: Rorty’s unconvincing attempts to show that traditional philosophy has had its day have largely been ...”