“... house Unbound) in March 2017 and ends with a ‘post-conclusion’ written just after Theresa May called last June’s snap election. At that point, May’s victory seemed certain, ‘given the apparent unelectability of the opposition’. In hindsight, Barnett must be glad of that ‘apparent’, and of having gone on ...”

“... with itself’. The Europe of the years between 1348 and 1418 emerged from the Black Death, which may have killed more than half of the population of the continent, and found a new vibrancy after unthinkable destruction. He hopes this will speak to our contemporary lassitude. The distance of a biblical lifetime between our time and the postwar period ...”

“... itself took the form of a collection of pensées) are clearly a labour of love. Auden may have needed the money – he mostly wrote prose in the winter in New York to finance summers writing poetry in Europe – but he evidently took pride in his facility and his craftsmanship. Robert Lowell responded with a fellow craftsman’s appreciativeness ...”

“... the corporate first division. On the strength of its success, it made another evolutionary leap in May 1990, by opening the first Super Crown in Alexandria, Virginia. These new establishments were (for the time) mega-large: public library-sized, as their publicity pointed out. A Super Crown was duly erected on South Lake, replacing its diminutive ...”

“... we have, which itself contains only a fraction of the material available to the editor. Readers may find it useful to have at hand Ian Hamilton’s masterly biography, first published in 1983, if only to provide more continuity, close some of the gaps in the story. He is thorough, lucid and just (admiring and condemning), and it is a bonus that his comments ...”

“... sack of stale bread for her pigs. More enlightening was the remark made to him by Churchill in May 1940 when France fell, and passed on to Liddell: ‘The end,’ Churchill is supposed to have said, ‘is very near, but there will be no surrender. We shall go down fighting.’ This suggests that when Churchill made his ‘Fight them on the ...”

“... imaginatively creative figure than as an Enlightenment action man and civil rights advocate. This may be a suitable characterisation for the early 21st century, but it underplays the extent to which Voltaire’s life was driven as much by a determined quest for literary immortality as ‘a life in pursuit of freedom’, as Pearson subtitles his ...”

“... British forces are largely confined to their camps around Basra. A ‘national unity government’ may be established but it will not be national, will certainly be disunited and may govern very little. ‘The government could end up being a few buildings in the Green Zone,’ one minister said. The army and police are ...”

“... to the audience, we become God by proxy, the Delphic oracle that never replies. Soliloquy may be seen, then, not merely as an address, but as speech with an interlocutor who does not respond – as blocked conversation and blocked intention. Again, this may flow from the idea of prayer, especially prayer as the ...”

“... 21st-century readers are likely to deepen and broaden understandings of her poetic project. This may not be printing, but as a form of publishing it is more intimate and shameless than the decorous recensions of Dickinson’s first editors. Franklin’s elaborate editorial apparatus is designed to counter the Editorial Collective’s position, but ends up by ...”

“... Five Points,* convincingly argues that the Bowery Boys gang was neither nativist nor anti-Wood (it may have had Irish members) and that its momentary support of the state police was due to internecine Democratic rivalries – the 1857 riot has been taken to be emblematic of a lawless and brutal era. As with other moments of civil unrest, an extraordinarily ...”

“... Charles Reznikoff​ may be the most elusive poet in American poetry and his book-length Testimony the most elusive long poem of modernism. He is remembered as a kind of New York saint, an urban Emily Dickinson: the unknown poet, walking the city streets, writing intense, seemingly matter-of-fact lyrics about things he saw and heard ...”

“... steps to prevent us blowing ourselves up or indulging ourselves to pieces. The free-will thing may have prevented us from growing as wise as we could be, but imagine what the planet would be like without their surreptitious interventions. Aliens have nothing but contempt for us, or they love us. Oddly, they don’t seem to be indifferent to us (how could ...”

“... loneliness . . . cooked away, as we spoke, like hot oil on a skillet.’ The habit may have something to do with Wray’s training as a poet, which tends to inflate the market for odd metaphorisations. But then Ezra Pound didn’t say the apparition of those faces in the crowd was like ‘petals on a wet, black bough’, and after a hundred ...”

“... what innumerable doctors have had to say about it. This historical prudence is welcome, because it may well be that hysteria – this ‘Proteus’ as Thomas Sydenham called it in the 17th century – is never anything other than what we say about it, and that hysterics adapt themselves to doctors’ expectations and theories, thereby confirming them. This was ...”