“... found expression, were prerequisites of writing serious poems a century later. Eliot’s praise of John Davidson’s ‘Thirty Bob a Week’ as ‘the only poem in which Davidson freed himself completely from the poetic diction of English verse of his time’, so that ‘the poem is to me a great poem for ever’ may seem excessive. When one compares ...”

“... intake of meat. (While preparing for Christ’s return Mrs White’s protégé, the nutritionist John Kellogg, developed a special vegetarian diet of processed corn, transforming Battle Creek, Michigan, where the Seventh-Day Adventists had their headquarters, into the Breakfast Food Capital of the World.) Like Mormonism, Seventh-Day Adventism is now a ...”

“... included Alan Bullock (recipient of a self-righteous Orwell memo), William Empson and John Morris (both of whom wrote elegant memoirs of Orwell at the BBC); he employed Nye Bevan, Richard Acland, J.B.S. Haldane, T.S. Eliot, Quintin Hogg, Bernard Shaw; he led a BBC party, that included Guy Burgess, to a special de-briefing by Stafford Cripps on his ...”

“... pack up and go home. She will like the illustrated edition of Priestley’s English Journey. John Hadfield, the picture editor, has found photographs – some taken by people like Humphrey Spender and Bill Brandt who went to the North because they had read Priestley’s book – which illustrate the text with astonishing exactness. Yet the photographs of ...”

“... of the Apocalypse reappear in the angel’s dialectical relationship with the storm. But unlike John the Revelator, who was told to ‘seal up those things which the thunders uttered and write them not’, Benjamin wrote down what the thunders said, for in the violence of the storm he seems to have heard the still small voice of Kant, arguing for ...”

“... that Muldoon has chosen to write about poets – Yeats, Hughes, Frost, Bishop, Dickinson, Stevie Smith, Lowell, Montale, Pessoa, Marianne Moore, H.D., Tsvetaeva, Arnold, Auden, Graves, Heaney, Day-Lewis – whose idiom is peculiarly distinctive (Day-Lewis being the possible exception, but Muldoon, characteristically tricky, chooses to write about a poor poem ...”

“... of Cape Town and Table Mountain. Among those who have bought houses here are Earl Spencer, Elton John and Michael Douglas, but the oddity is that, while you might assume, as you drive through its wonderful avenues, that Constantia’s residents are nothing if not respectable, you’d be dead wrong, because not only did Mark set himself up in palatial style ...”

“... Boston . . . Portland . . . Bangor . . . Meductic . . . Sydney, Nova Scotia . . . St John’s, Newfoundland. Then the trail goes cold: it is said he enlisted in the crew of a Danish fishing boat. It was probably during this journey that Cravan’s last extant literary text was written. A sheaf of what might be called ‘automatic writings’, it ...”

“... by their peers – that much was certain. The Clarence Thomas hearings and the William Kennedy Smith rape trial had introduced cable subscribers to something called the ‘Court Channel’. This service gives non-stop live coverage to high-profile trials. Cameras were allowed into the King trial, and every minute of the daytime proceedings was covered (the ...”

“... Permira wants to acquire HMV. Hundreds of millions of borrowed pounds are flying around. WH Smith wonders whether to de-diversify and go back, wholeheartedly, into books. Meanwhile the high-street supermarkets are skimming the cream with bookstands offering bestsellers and Richard & Judy selections at bargain basement prices. And there is agitated, and ...”

“... Denbigh’ by Anthony van Dyck (c.1633) In her introduction to the catalogue, the curator Alison Smith says it’s ‘an anomaly that having laboriously assembled over the course of centuries the world’s largest empire, the British … should have been so reticent in making any great claim for their art. Indeed, compared to the antique remains of Rome, or ...”

“... the story of the Algiers Motel killings, already the subject of several books, including one by John Hersey published in 1968. A young cop fires at a looter, and defends himself not on the grounds that the victim was armed or even that he could have been, but that he might have done something else unlawful during the rioting. The victim later dies, and we ...”

“... clay was provided for free.) It looked as if she might do anything. But then, in 1953, she met John Bratby. The year after they got together and got married – it took a week – Bratby finished his studies at the Royal College of Art and, thanks to a famous essay by David Sylvester in Encounter, found himself at the head of a movement. ‘Everything but ...”

“... present him as Squire Booby of Booby Hall. Before going up to Oxford he had to be coached by a Mr Smith (later the Master of Balliol), while Mrs Smith endeavoured to enliven him by singing a comic song: ‘My jolly red nose, caused by gin, I suppose.’ Despite intensive coaching, he nearly failed the Oxford entrance ...”

“... John Le Carré called it ‘the Abteilung’, but the real name of the East German foreign intelligence department was the Hauptverwaltung Aufklärung, or Main Intelligence Directorate, and the man who ran it for almost 34 years was Markus Wolf. When the Berlin Wall fell, three years after his retirement in 1986, Wolf was courted by other intelligence services – West German, American, even Israeli – who hoped to exploit his vulnerable position ...”