“... a number of illustrious admirers – including those poetic polar opposites, Geoffrey Hill and John Ashbery – his poetry is still not widely known. ‘Soldiers Bathing’, it’s true, is likely to feature in any anthology or critical account of the poetry of the Second World War, and assiduous scholars of both Hill and Ashbery have explored Prince’s ...”

“... Browne and Congreve as well as such less remembered figures as the sea captain Robert Knox, and John Chilton, who, Macdonald speculates, was ‘probably’ the author of Voyage to the West Indies … in the year 1560. The penalty for wearing so much learning lightly was, at this midpoint in her career, to be patronised by the more severe and humourless ...”

“... breakthroughs ‘followed by complete democratic breakdowns or coups d’état’. Democratisation took a more sedate course in Britain, Belgium, the Netherlands, Norway, Sweden and Denmark, where – despite some resistance and occasional hazards – there was steady incremental progress towards settled democracy. Old conservative elites, Ziblatt ...”

“... 18 notebooks with spiritual reflections and saw the face of the Lord in the leaves of a tree. He took communion and confessed his sins. Then, in April 1993, he stumbled on another story, about a young boy who had lost all his senses; he was lifeless but still alive. At the thought of such futile suffering, Carrère’s faith folded. ‘I forsake ...”

“... not far from the President’s House, the third presidential mansion, where George Washington and John Adams lived, and a tourist destination for those who don’t leave colonial tours shaking the experience out of their heads as if in imitation of the Liberty Bell, Philly’s cracked symbol of freedom. For years, the historical society responsible for the ...”

“... German voices dimly audible in the background. The result was spooky enough, even before you took into account the trippy visuals, which included a talking bear, a malevolent dwarf and a giant goldfish, which had been trapped in a pool of ice after the enchanted garden where it lived had been cast into an eternal Narnia-like winter. These scenes haunted ...”

“... they should have been under existing policy). Charles Clarke was replaced as home secretary by John Reid, who described the Home Office as ‘not fit for purpose’. Non-citizens with criminal records found themselves facing deportation. Current prisoners without British citizenship were identified, and when their sentences ended were held in prisons and ...”

“... a physicist who studied with Einstein at Princeton until he was drafted into the war effort. This took him to a nuclear materials facility in Tennessee. There he met their mother, a ‘calutron girl’ working at Y-12, a plant for the electromagnetic separation of the uranium 235 isotope. After their divorce, both parents died of cancer. It was around this ...”

“... of her finest descriptive writing is about boxing, a sport she has watched since her father took her to Golden Gloves fights when she was a child. Oates sees the boxing ring as a site where spontaneity must emerge out of a tightly disciplined structure. Boxing, she points out, is as much about losing as winning. Even the best careers are ...”

“... credits her grandfather with inspiring her to ‘make meaning in the world’ through words. She took a line from one of Keats’s letters as her credo: ‘I am certain of nothing but the holiness of the Heart’s affection and the truth of the Imagination.’ At high school, di Prima and a group of friends (which included Audre Lorde) discovered the ...”

“... with multiple sets, many costumes and guest appearances by everybody from Carl Jung to Elton John. There are overshared war experiences, bouts of snotty complaining, daddy issues, mummy issues, brother issues, bedroom-size issues, whose-palace-is-it-anyway issues, arguments about tiaras, Kate Middleton issues and ...”

“... mostly American group made up by herself, Walter Berry, Howard Sturgis, Morton Fullerton, John Hugh Smith, Percy Lubbock and a few other initiates. She emphasises the man’s ‘quality of fun’, and her James is ‘the laughing, chaffing, jubilant yet malicious James’, not ‘the grave personage known to less intimate eyes’. Like the letters of ...”

“... judgment’. The new theology, completed under visionary inspiration by Ellen White, took the Seventh-Day Adventists down the path from Pre- to Post-Millennialism trodden by other millenarian movements such as the Mormons. Since Christ would not come down until humanity cleaned up its act, people had first to purify themselves, spiritually by ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... 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 ...”