“... and drove him to fits of remorse. ‘I hope a letter is not too melodramatic,’ he writes to Michael and Edna Longley, after a perceived early failure to be an advocate for poetry in the North: ‘It is not so much in the hope of redressing any hurt as to allay my own embarrassment and guilt. As usual your attitude has been gracious and gentle in the ...”

“... happened to have been unusually pro-British, having had his son christened George in honour of King George V, and also insisting that ‘George Blake’ should retain his British nationality. The plot now thickens – and especially after the Allied victory has been won in the ruins of Berlin. For by then ‘Stalin’s Englishmen’, that remnant of the ...”

“... mind. The volume also includes Auden’s hitherto unpublished translation of the Icelandic ‘Sun King’, the work of a Christian skald in traditional Eddaic form, a vision of the seven heavens and of Lucifer the dragon who waylays the Christian soul. Auden’s flatness here (‘The unpredictable often may/Have sad and cruel results ... ’) is redeemed ...”

“... It has long been accepted that neither the Union of Crowns of 1603, which saw the Scottish King James VI move south to London, nor the Treaty of Union of 1707 served to cancel out Scottish distinctiveness. In educational, ecclesiastical, intellectual and legal terms, and not only those, Scotland has always retained significant ...”

“... model’, for apparently ‘Biblical government is minimal [and] decentralised’, though neither King Herod’s Massacre of the Innocents nor the various genocides of the Old Testament seem all that minimalist. The Institute of Directors is perhaps not meant to be taken very seriously, but the Conservative Party does have that ambition. Yet the official ...”

“... at home in Rome, was as much concerned with compositional elegance as believability: in his Saint Michael and the Devil (1607), the saint props his knee on candyfloss clouds so delicate it’s hard to imagine them taking his weight. Artemisia’s Allegory of Inclination (1615-16), by contrast, part of a decorative ceiling in Florence commissioned by ...”

“... to investigate without political interference. It would have sixty staff, the then home secretary, Michael Howard, announced in 1995, ‘about three times the number currently engaged in such work’, who would ‘reflect the broad mix of legal, investigative and administrative skills and experience needed’. It would have twelve commissioners, three of whom ...”

“... version, but he would have known the mythic one quite well: for in the story of Perseus, the king and his court, who had sent the hero for the head of Gorgon Medusa, had to look when he took the disfigured thing from his bag, and were turned into stone. What goes for seeing also goes for imagining we are seeing. We do a lot of such imagining, and many of ...”

“... in a Sunday newspaper in two days’ time. How can I not be manic? The next day I met the poet Michael Horowitz in the local health-food shop. The last time I bumped into him, in the same place a few months before, I was about to deliver my completed manuscript. Today, I asked him to my launch party. ‘Maybe I could review your book,’ he said. ‘That ...”

“... it in 2018 for more than a million dollars. The blurbs from people like Gillian Flynn and Stephen King (‘stunning’, ‘gripping’, ‘brilliant’) led me to believe I was sitting down to a thriller, but there are no unexpected plot twists here. In a disclaimer, Russell says any similarities with her own upbringing – she grew up in Maine and withdrew ...”

“... Very few Anglo-Saxons had access to enough books to warrant even a bookshelf. As Michael Lapidge tells us, they kept their ‘libraries’ in boxes, and when an Anglo-Saxon scholar ‘wished to consult a book, he got down on his hands and knees and rummaged round in the chest until he came upon the book he required’. Neither the boxes nor ...”

“... again a willed brightness was overtaking Pym as he listened to the many voices in his mind. To be king, he repeated to himself. To look with favour on this child that was myself. To love his defects and his strivings, and pity his simplicity.’ Adults spy on childhood just as children spy on them. The childhood apprehensions of Jane Eyre or Pip from Great ...”

“... been reissued as rather grand paperbacks, along with an eighth, a final hardback selection made by Michael Bloch. They all have titles like Ancestral Voices, Caves of Ice, Through Wood and Dale, Midway on the Waves and Prophesying Peace, and it will not escape the notice of the literate public that they are all derived, one with a bit of a spin on it, from ...”

“... Robert Graves’s I, Claudius, or Danny Hill: Memoirs of a Prominent Gentleman (edited by Francis King) and Margaret Forster’s ‘edition’ of Thackeray’s Memoirs of a Victorian Gentleman, the book mingled respected literary figures still alive in Britain with private characters who, if not invented, were surely concealed like the author himself under ...”

“... codes were in place, it appears that there was not a problem about this. At least, a man like King Oedipus was deemed as abjectly guilty as a man could be for crimes which were wholly inadvertent. It is interesting that Vonnegut, in his fictions of morality in a deterministic world, hits often been drawn to invent careers which resemble ...”