“... of Unionist voters as part of that overall vote. There is also an article by the No-campaigner Robert McCartney, a barrister and UK Unionist MP whom no one in Britain I know has ever heard of. Perhaps that’s because he’s kept the press on their guard with his proven readiness to sue for libel (there was a famous episode in Northern Ireland some years ...”

“... puppet, a half-animal creature, a faun, a character from the Commedia dell’Arte or even a Green boy in love with himself was much easier for him. He needed a mask.’ In some larger sense – in some way to do with desire and death at the Fin de Siècle – Nijinsky also appeared like a prophecy, a frightening conjuror with the energies of the ...”

“... was heavily revised in 1844) and the vivid anti-war poem Captain Sword and Captain Pen (1835). Robert Morrison’s volume on the piecemeal journalism of 1822-38 gives a very good sense of Hunt the critic, showing his extraordinary eye for new talent (the reviews of the young Carlyle, Browning and Tennyson are particularly insightful). Charles Mahoney’s ...”

“... The elongated shards of smog grey, pea green and lemonade that, since 1968, have cast a wan light on pews reserved for the use of MPs in St Margaret’s, Westminster, are untypical of John Piper. Normally, his stained glass seethes, particularly in Coventry Cathedral, where a Piper sunburst behind the boulder that serves as a font irradiates a great wall of clunky fenestration ...”

“... is dismayed to notice, when his thoughts turn to ending it all – in the style of Hart Crane or Robert Maxwell – that, wherever he jumps from, he will probably only find more superyacht beneath him. A woman’s hair may be ‘a sort of aureate beige’ or ‘dyed a maximal black’. Pleasures are technical, liquid and faddish; they are afforded by ...”

“... Barry was an eccentric, seen ‘in his worst (that is to say, his maddest) days’, according to Robert Southey, in a dirt and paint-encrusted green baize coat with a tired old wig. But a bequest was the best hope for the two women, whose other male relatives had proven unreliable. Margaret’s brother, John, apprenticed ...”

“... seems to have sat and read in something like an octagonal closet, nine feet across and painted green and white, with eight desks and drawers for books. By removing the drawers he could take the books with him from residence to residence, slotting them into other similar reading closets. Most early library rooms have been lost, but there are some jewel-like ...”

“... prizes the Oedipus complex. It would, wouldn’t it? Blake’s cultivation of his brother Robert was, apparently, ‘his most sustained and successful piece of Oedipal insubordination’, a means of ‘displacing his parents – particularly his father’. Aren’t the poems full of oppressive fathers, from Tiriel to Nobodaddy? ‘William’s poems ...”

“... route, Peter Redgrove has arrived back at a very ancient place: or at any rate, a place that Robert Graves unearthed in The White Goddess and would have us believe is ancient. Graves is probably right: but it is best to approach enchanted ground, as he himself does, doubly armed, with red thread around a rowan twig and a pinch of scepticism. What is ...”

“... wrote of a Greek doctor who gazed wonderingly at Disraeli’s garb of red shirt, silver buttons, green pantaloons, jacket festooned with ribbons, Turkish slippers, and then asked: ‘Questo vestito Inglese o di fantasia?’ To this there came a reply which Monypenny describes as ‘oracular’, but which seems to me richly appropriate to the story as a ...”

“... Fled backward with a gimlet in its heart To see the two youths swimming hand in hand Through green eternity. O swept overboard Not could the thirty-foot jaws them part, or the flouncing skirts that swept them over Separate what death pronounced was love. It is a most subtle use of archaism, in diction, properties and propriety – lamentation and ...”

“... sight of something by the shore of the lake: turtles waddling in to end the story in the manner of Robert Lowell’s ‘Skunk Hour’ or Tobias Wolff’s ‘Poaching’: ‘They watch those turtles on their slow march and behold those ancient creatures, shell-backed and the colour of time, as they lower themselves, turtle upon turtle, disappearing into the ...”

“... of Fountain’s long apprenticeship is that his 1970s-vintage literary models – among them Robert Stone, Joan Didion and Norman Mailer in Vietnam-era reportage mode – turned out to be pretty useful for a writer hitting his stride at the start of the 21st century. His main adjustments concern mood. For the pill-popping nerviness of Didion and ...”

“... than the dress itself suggests.By now Nicholson had begun on the still lifes. The Lustre Bowl with Green Peas and The Lowestoft Bowl (both 1911) are two of the most beautiful. Having been commissioned before the war to create a decorative scheme for the Paris apartment of the author Edward Knoblock, Nicholson set up a studio there and painted Studio Still Life ...”

“... of curiosity: historical, technical, geographical. The result falls short of the masterpiece that Robert Penn Warren hails on the jacket. It needs a bigger and better-stocked mind to carry the reader from one individually satisfying sketch to another over such a long span. But for a writer’s first published book it is a formidable achievement, combining the ...”