“... on British Sea Songs, including ‘The Sailor’s Hornpipe’; ‘Rule, Britannia!’ composed by Thomas Arne, with orchestration by Malcolm Sargent; and finally ‘Jerusalem’, set to music by Parry, and later reorchestrated by Elgar. All of these involve active participation by the audience which, as the second half advances, becomes ever more ...”

“... villainy. 16 March. To St Etheldreda’s, Ely Place for the funeral of Anna Haycraft (aka Alice Thomas Ellis) who died a week or so ago in Wales and whose body had therefore to be brought down for the funeral and then presumably taken back to Wales to be buried beside Colin, her late husband, at their Welsh farmhouse. This, I gather, is pretty remote and ...”

“... Royal Academy, only a few years after its founding in 1768; and it was there that he may have met Thomas Rowlandson, the other outstanding caricaturist of his generation.Alice Loxton spins her exuberant popular history around that friendship, and calls on their mutual friend Henry Angelo for testimony on Gillray’s early mastery: ‘The facility with which ...”

“... its incorporation of stray materials, the personal touch on the elbow that the American poet Frank Bidart, a close friend and associate of Lowell’s, ‘both amanuensis and sounding-board’ for the many books of sonnets, has brought to it. (A no doubt garbled account once reached me of Lowell flying Bidart across the Atlantic, so that he could fix ...”

“... Speaking’) on feminism, Gorbachev and deconstruction, which is in some ways engagingly frank about its aims, in some ways (I think) mistaken in achieving them. He sets out to perform ‘a great service ... to the dwindling body of linguistic reactionaries’ – namely, to provide an argument for the use of he as opposed to he or she, s/he etc. He ...”

“... secretive. On the other, he does not want us to set any store by such observations. He is also frank about his role as a maker who touches things up: he is obviously painting a romantic ‘portrait’. The same unnamed narrator praises the candour of Pechorin’s diaries (‘this man who so relentlessly displayed his personal weakness and defects for all ...”

“... Merrill’s called The Bait. During a soliloquy ‘heads swivelled as “Arthur Miller and Dylan Thomas … stumbled out,”’ ‘passing judgment’, as Hammer puts it, ‘with their feet’. ‘I learned what Mr Miller, with uncanny insight, had whispered in Dylan’s ear shortly after the curtain rose,’ Merrill wrote years later in his memoir A ...”

“... region had plenty of liberals, but a category that includes both Miranda – who corresponded with Thomas Paine, participated in the American and French Revolutions and led Venezuela’s break from Spain – and Porfirio Díaz, Mexico’s strongman for around 30 years at the turn of the 20th century, is as volatile as the politics that the term ...”

“... an ex-Cluniac monastery that was among the properties (they included Kirkstall Abbey) granted to Thomas Cranmer on the death of Henry VIII. It wasn’t actually included in the royal will but was part of the general share-out that occurred then to fulfil the wishes supposedly expressed by Henry VIII on his deathbed. Not far away is Harewood House (where I do ...”

“... him as little more than an ex-con with a pen, joked that Himes must have been the model for Bigger Thomas, the murderous anti-hero of Wright’s 1940 novel, Native Son; Baldwin wrote that ‘Mr Himes seems capable of some of the worst writing this side of the Atlantic.’ Jackson, whose previous book, The Indignant Generation, was a formidable history of black ...”

“... toward something ‘other than imagery – towards narrative’. Having broken a taboo with his frank and sometimes repellent account of his feelings for his parents, Guibert is now free to launch into his most horrendous book, Vous m’avez fait former des fantômes, a nightmarish, stomach-turning récit about capturing and torturing children. The title ...”

“... masts went as high as that. The four-arch bridge across the River Irvine was built by a certain Thomas Brown in 1750, for the price of £350. Ten years before, the Royal Burgh’s sunken wells, dank and rotten, had been replaced by the Council. Pump wells were installed, and fresh water was all the rage. The second half of the 18th century, in a small ...”

“... of the music into the life which is most damaging to the music. Hence, Variations on a Theme of Frank Bridge reflects ‘all the conflicting states of mind Britten was experiencing while he composed it’, even down to his ‘delight in discovering the Suffolk countryside’ ‘Peter Grimes becomes Britten’s dream of what he might be like if he abandoned ...”

“... Lowell made changes to the book as a result of this letter, but he left the sections quoted above. Frank Bidart wrote in his notes to the poems: ‘Lowell responded by fundamentally changing the book. Several of the poems in Hardwick’s voice were muted by taking them out of direct quotation, placed in italics, their anguish and anger softened.’ Lowell ...”

“... it was to do? He solved that problem by engaging three Kingsmen, F.E. Adcock, Dillwyn Knox and Frank Birch, who had worked in the First World War in Room 40at the Admiralty. They at once recruited ten more Kingsmen as well as other Cambridge dons and some German linguists. The most fertile fields they reaped were those of the Classics and Ancient ...”