“... back-to-basics language, in which people of same-sex desire are portrayed as members of a family, close community or tribe. It is an unfortunate but probably inevitable side-effect of campaigning for equal rights that homosexuals have had to prove that they are not only able to fulfil the responsibilities of citizenship but, absurdly, are better able to do so ...”

“... landscape: this is what Johnny Foreigner is doing, take it or leave it. That’s what shows in Frank O’Hara’s great poem of 1959, ‘The Day Lady Died’, when he buys himself a hamburger and a malted and ‘an ugly NEW WORLD WRITING to see what the poets / in Ghana are doing these days’. Subsequently, foreign titles had something of the status of ...”

“... and he certainly tried to follow his own precept – ‘if the picture is no good you are not close enough.’ But Whelan’s book does make you re-run the great World War Two pictures in your head, and wonder what they tell you about that war. Capa had something of the amoral charm of Thomas Mann’s Felix Krull: ‘It is a favourite theory of ...”

“... Hitchcock’s thriller, on the television, with stringy, frightening music and a wooden plot. I close my eyes but cannot go to sleep. Should I give up business and return to the ‘little’ author I was in Suffolk for almost ten years while working on Monty? Philip Ziegler and others have written kindly about the final Monty volume, hoping that I will not ...”

“... who had said he would walk over his own grandmother to serve the President, and who, in his own frank admission, was responsible for many a dirty trick, which he now regrets bitterly. Even before he went to prison, after the disclosures connected with Watergate, he had undergone a very remarkable Christian conversion. When he emerged, he not only wrote a ...”

“... full the widespread silliness of the Thirties about Russia. ‘Harold was able to have perfectly frank discussions with Maisky, who found him safe as well as sympathetic.’ He felt ‘stricken to the dust’ by the Russo-German pact of 1939, sharing the astonishment with many innocent leftists. Several years later he could still write: ‘Not that I have ...”

“... gains, and so does the world at large.’ Brunel’s fame eclipsed that of his father. His close friend Daniel Gooch, whose memoirs and diary only became generally available after 1972, called him ‘the greatest of England’s engineers’. Vaughan, who has written many books on railways, does not question Brunel’s genius, yet he accuses Rolt of the ...”

“... perpetual itinerancy. She began by writing free verse – her early work tended to emulate Frank O’Hara and other New York poets – and now composes mostly in rhyme and off-rhyme. She completed her third collection, Shoulder Season (2010), in Beirut. But her ‘poet baptism in the Mediterranean’, which brought an ‘altered relation to ...”

“... his teeth upturned into a wicked smile within his skull; his eyeballs are intact, wide and frank as in modern manga. The pinch of the curtain beneath his fingertips foreshadows the horror to come. In its purest form, manga refers only to serialised comic books, always black and white and read from right to left, back cover to front cover. At the ...”

“... the building from scratch of new museums as vast containers for huge artwork, as exemplified by Frank Gehry’s Guggenheim Bilbao. In some respects this bigness is the outcome of a space race between architects like Gehry and artists like Serra, and by now it seems almost natural to us. Yet there is nothing definitive about it: well-regarded artists who ...”

“... New Zealand, all national dots. Not all poets love places. And not many poets love cities the way Frank O’Hara loved New York. Crawford, like his nearest literary forebear Norman MacCaig, loves places both rural and urban: in his work, he can throw his voice ‘deep down the larynx of Glen Esk’, and he can marry Iona, or bring the reader into ...”

“... and memories, rammed together in a style Hugh Kenner called ‘unmortared’, Joyce came close to inventing a language that seemed to contain the mind’s endless restlessness.Lucy Ellmann’s new novel, Ducks, Newburyport, does not, despite the claims of some reviewers, consist of a single sentence (I counted 880). But it does contain one very long ...”

“... entrants, including two vicars and the mayor of Norwich. The following year the final was won by Frank Hadow, ‘a big-game hunter who ran a coffee plantation in Ceylon and who returned there after the tournament never to be seen at Wimbledon again’. Tennis’s international appeal derived from its dependability (it could be played on lawns, but also on ...”

“... Hunt his house when it appeared she might figure in divorce proceedings. His explanation was quite frank: it was a matter of her ‘position’, and by implication of his. I really don’t see how an old friend of yours could feel or pronounce your being in a position to permit of this [public scandal] anything but ‘lamentable’, lamentable – oh ...”

“... because a) his poems are often dirty to the point of showing you stuff that might make you close your browser window quickly; b) the dirtiness tends to be very carefully shaped, as though the sexual energy is formed by generations of artful convention, so that you could well imagine that if he had actually been into bondage (and who knows?) it would ...”