“... nationale, with an educational system that is so benevolent as to wish to send every child to winter sports, with a population that is so neurotic as to advertise le gym, c’est aussi bon pour le morale, there is no need to justify an interest in sport. With La Roue Libre organising cyclists, with I’Amicale des Trois Vallées de I’Eure or the MPM ...”

“... was the two miners’ strikes of 1972 and 1974, but the more significant episode occurred in the winter of 1970-71 when the power workers’ go-slow instantly hit electricity supplies and drove the Government to send for Lord Wilberforce to make peace for them. Interviewed by the BBC, Frank Chapple was asked whether he wasn’t ashamed of the misery his ...”

“... Ada Kennard, a dancer in a three-women act that toured the music halls. His father was a Bob: Robert Moffat Livingstone, at different times a seafarer, a window cleaner and a stagehand. According to their son, the couple hadn’t wanted children. Then one night in September 1944, Bob ran out of condoms. The memoirist writes of his conception, ‘With ...”

“... I fear only France.’ He believed he had secured an agreement with the prime minister, Robert Peel, and Lord Aberdeen, his foreign secretary; they thought there had been merely a friendly discussion. All this was the background to the Crimean War of 1853-55, the subject of Orlando Figes’s admirable book. The war was at once the most dramatic ...”

“... as patient as a statue till he could be unveiled.’ Both indoors and outdoors, in summer as in winter, scarves, shawls and rugs were provided for maximum protection. For some Wedgwood-Darwins ‘a hot water bottle was as necessary as an arm or a leg.’ The prize for the most appealingly absurd failure among the obscure Wedgwoods must go to the ...”

“... hot and cold. In one of the first poems, we observe him shivering in exile through a Manhattan winter, ‘flu in my bones like a lantern’, sustained only by the thought that back home all is going on as always: the seas warm and the neighbours in the open together, ‘talking over palings’. But his opening Caribbean poem begins, disorientingly, with ...”

“... formed KLA attacked the Serb police and, on occasion, Albanians who supported the regime. Last winter, the police withdrew from some parts of the Drenica region after armed clashes, allowing uniformed and armed Albanians to set up checkpoints. Once the US envoy Robert Gelbard had issued a statement that me KLA could be ...”

“... four children, on 6 January 1916, three months before the Easter Rebellion, in which her father, Robert Brennan, served as a commandant in the Irish Volunteers. Following the surrender ordered by Pearse, he was sentenced first to death and then to penal servitude for life but was released soon after and went on to organise the Department of External Affairs ...”

“... and country in the 1590s, had sought to resolve it. The first was James I’s leading adviser Robert Cecil, first Earl of Salisbury, Lord Burghley’s son, whose ‘Great Contract’ of 1610 attempted to place the Crown’s finances on a less vexatious footing. Bedford used parliamentary pressure to the same end in 1641. Adamson’s account bears out ...”

“... than riot and affray, and will stand young men in better stead than their combustion spree in the winter of 2005, prompted by the death of two teenagers electrocuted in Clichy-sous-Bois as they hid from the police in an EDF substation. The 2007 presidential election – the first round is on 22 April, with the run-offs on 6 May – has moved matters along at ...”

“... I knelt and started to pray and prayed for everybody I thought of, Brett and Mike and Bill and Robert Cohn and myself, and all the bullfighters, separately for the ones I liked, and lumping all the rest, then I prayed for myself again, and while I was praying for myself I found I was getting sleepy, so I prayed that the bullfights would be good, and that ...”

“... imitating her squint against sunlight. The writers she is most directly associated with – Robert Creeley and Ed Dorn – were of the Black Mountain School, but she seems somehow to have more to do with the Beats, perhaps because she was always on the run; perhaps because of the drug addiction of her third husband, Buddy Berlin; perhaps because you can ...”

“... vocation, for himself and his successors’. The Larkin-Davie standoff oversimplifies matters, as Robert Lowell intimated when he said that the two poets who meant most to him were Pound and Hardy. This might seem an unlikely double-act, yet more than half a century earlier Pound had suggested that Hardy be included in an anthology of Imagist poetry, and had ...”

“... habit of reading Aristotle and Euripides between stops. He was very poor and weathered the deep winter of Chicago by wearing newspaper under his clothes; his colleagues liked to touch him to make him crackle. When Hamsun returned from the States he was 29, and although he had had no real literary success, he had already made himself something of an obstacle ...”

“... on the wane, the Oppens sent their daughter to college ” in the US, and paid her a visit that winter, though they themselves would not move back for another year or so. By then, Oppen had begun writing again. He had dreamed he was going through his father’s papers and found a file about preventing ‘rust in copper’. Copper does not rust, and the ...”