“... Watson at Gonville and Caius. (Mr Prynne, I’m told, doesn’t have much use for fiction: Patrick White excepted.) Poetry was struck off in the Eighties. Now it’s a special-interest item, available on prescription – like Southern Gothic vampirism, Uzi and crack Brixton scorchers, cyberpunk. Like the rest of genre fiction it is dealt with in compendium ...”

“... as in Eisenhower’s America, but dull nonetheless, not to mention smug. It is not surprising that Peter Hennessy should call his monumental history Having It So Good, nor that Dominic Sandbrook should call his equally monumental recent history of the late 1950s and early 1960s Never Had It So Good. This neatly illustrates the drawback of ...”

“... against earthquakes; their double brick walls, proof against Tibet’s winters; and their austere white façades decorated with black-painted window frames and enlivened by fluttering pelmets – has largely been bulldozed. The remnants are now known as the Tibetan city, a small island in the sea of the new Chinese city. Every spring, the Dalai Lama used to ...”

“... pencils. ‘You’d think once in the year,’ she’d say, ‘they’d leave me out a biscuit.’ Peter Hinchcliffe said: ‘Who do you think you are, the Queen of Sheba?’ Our school​ was situated on a lane, unmade in those days, that ran uphill to high ground. On the Top, we called it, and from it the land fell away to Slaide Hill, a dense tangle of ...”

“... toil and tension. Bailey is 70. He looks like a creased version of Buffalo Bill with his longish white hair. He wears layers of clothes that seem to have been retrieved from his son’s gym locker and on his head a blue cotton cap against the February cold. He is a Wykehamist, an Ancient History and Classical scholar, who became a Battle of Britain fighter ...”

“... to Clark’s standing as the representative spokesman (especially after the death of Patrick White a few months before) of a certain kind of Australian radical-democratic nationalism. Had the conservative parties been in power, the funeral rites would have been rather different: Liberal Party grandees would not have crowded the cathedral. As Clark became ...”

“... the best of them began to publish – John James, Chris Torrance, Lee Harwood, Andrew Crozier, Peter Riley, J.H. Prynne, Michael Haslam, Douglas Oliver, Barry MacSweeney, Denise Riley – they must nonetheless wonder, from time to time, whether theirs is a case of having missed the boat which would only have been worth catching if they’d been on it in ...”

“... work by which he is – invisibly – best known to modern popular culture outside Russia, via the Peter Shaffer play it inspired, Amadeus, rendered onto the big screen by Miloš Forman. In Mikhailovskoye, as well as parts of Eugene Onegin, Pushkin wrote the historical drama Boris Godunov, finished the long poem The Gypsies, wrote the prologue to his first ...”

“... as a child, though I read about polar explorers and enjoyed the mise-en-scène of polar bears, white-outs, ice floes and the rest, the word ‘north’ exercised over me little of the magic it has for so many others, including Kavenna and Peter Davidson. ‘The Idea of North’ was the Canadian pianist Glenn Gould’s ...”

“... digesting the Times at the Reform or Athenaeum, before sorting out the world’s evils. But as Peter Clark, Britain’s leading urban historian, notes in a characteristically fact-packed but thoughtful study, that most English of institutions was going strong long before then. Indeed, Sam Johnson’s beloved ‘clubbable’ men must have been in clover in ...”

“... superlatives on the jacket of Hugo Williams’s Collected Poems – Edna Longley, Douglas Dunn and Peter Porter – none is English. And yet Williams, born in Windsor during World War Two, the son of the English actor Hugh Williams, schooled by Life and Eton, a youthful toiler for Alan Ross’s London Magazine, an erstwhile globetrotter and a lifelong London ...”

“... return. At the Royal Academy, Majesty is a three-metre-high photograph of a tree overpainted in white gouache: she meticulously traced round each branch and twig. As a subject, it has its origin in Dean’s practice of collecting old postcards from flea markets around the world: in Japan once, she says, she kept inexplicably coming across images of the ...”

“... main functions would be to pool information about flour. Participants shared sightings of plain white flour in local shops or online suppliers with the secretive thrill of foragers who’ve just discovered a patch of wild garlic or chanterelles. When one neighbour managed to get hold of some, it would be portioned up and distributed or bartered for other ...”

“... work had let go earlier. He began the ‘Russian Nights’ enterprise on the crest of a wave. The White Hotel (1981) catapulted him to international fame. It was a novelist’s fairy-tale: ignored or ridiculed as high-falutin’ pornography in the UK, Thomas’s Freudian fantasia sold only a few hundred and seemed destined for oblivion. But it was ...”

“... Now another guide enters and, propping herself, kneels by me with a small bowl. She removes a white lotion (baby cream?) and then starts to massage (I see, the medium is the massage) my hand. At first I am unresilient, but then begin to ply her hand with the lotion. Couples begin putting the stuff on hands, arms and faces to feel and touch. We are inside ...”