“... though his friend Linda Rosenkrantz recalled that fear with a slightly different emphasis: ‘I hope I’m not remembered as just a gay photographer.’What we do know is that in 1966 Hujar invited two ‘leather queens’, Jay and Fernando, to his studio. ‘In the session,’ Durbin writes, ‘Jay and Fernando admire each other’s uniforms, gold ...”

“... it and let me know – there’s no hurry. I know you’ll make a marvellous literary executor. I hope you don’t mind my asking – if you find the idea too much of a bore, just say so – but I think you’ll have quite an interesting time going through all my letters and so on and deciding what ought to be done with them. And by the way, if you do feel ...”

“... and outlives the majority of human passions: Dante’s is one of those which one can only just hope to grow up to at the end of life. This is a fine tribute not only to the verse that caused the hit that causes the shudder, but to the wholeness that is required for its accommodation. I suppose that in the nature of the case, when the poets concerned are ...”

“... blunders of the German elite’ can’t be made to shoulder all the blame. In The Sleepwalkers, Christopher Clark deploys on a grander scale and over a much longer timeframe essentially the same argument.* ‘The protagonists of 1914,’ he writes at the end, ‘were sleepwalkers, watchful but unseeing, haunted by dreams, yet blind to the reality of the ...”

“... always, the over-fertility of Empson’s mind, and the frantic pseudo-discipline he applied in the hope of controlling that fertility. Complex words are complex because of the range of social attitudes they can imply, and because of the range of senses they have, and because of their distinctive histories, and because of the particular circumstances in which ...”

“... of the mother goddess to whom the Tollund Man and his luckless counterparts were offered up in the hope that their deaths might persuade her to restore fertility to the land in the spring. ‘They were sacrificed and placed in the sacred bogs,’ Glob puts it, rather brightly, ‘consecrated for all time to Nerthus, goddess of fertility – to Mother ...”

“... obscure or factitious’. ‘Are you allowed to be as funny as that about a sacred subject?’ Christopher Ricks, his commissioning editor, is said to have asked; and being funny is obviously an important element in the iconoclasm. When Ian Hamilton asked him to reflect on the contemporary poetry scene in 1972 for the Review, Carey duly noted some ...”

“... victim of a ‘lofty malady’ – the title of one of Pasternak’s longer poems. ‘There is no hope,’ proclaims a lyric of Mandelstam, for a heart ever burning With nightingale fever. Dr Hingley takes the phrase to characterise his study of the four greatest poets of Russia’s post-Revolutionary age. All four say, in this context, the same ...”

“... heavy walk, the mind whose hopes were once invincible now knowing that it has nothing left to hope for, gaiety itself dried up for ever, that innate and seemingly immortal gaiety, which kept such pleasant company with sadness – perhaps the person who could see that … like Henri van Blarenberghe when he had finished off his mother with dagger ...”

“... the medical profession. It was partly because he listened, as doctors have learned to do since, I hope, but which in the early 1960s they hardly did at all. Kind and in some respects saintly, his care for his patients brought on regular breakdowns and he was no stranger to depression. Famous as Sylvia Plath’s doctor, he always reproached himself that he did ...”

“... produced the trash, a lurid account written by the former British MI6 intelligence agent Christopher Steele, based on hearsay purchased from anonymous Russian sources. Amid prostitutes and golden showers, a story emerged: the Russian government had been blackmailing and bribing Donald Trump for years, on the assumption that he would become president ...”

“... and Veronika Weiss. Rodger then went on a drive-by shooting spree through Isla Vista, killing Christopher Michaels-Martinez, also a student at UCSB, with a single bullet to the chest inside a Deli Mart, and wounding 14 others. He eventually crashed his BMW coupé at an intersection. He was found dead by the police, having shot himself in the head. In the ...”

“... period of putting its own house in order, is now widely recognised in the Party, and one can only hope that Roy Jenkins continues to give it his highest priority. For he was elected leader, I believe, not because he is the darling of the Party, but, above all, because his judgment commands the respect even of those who regard him as insufficiently radical. It ...”

“... but the ambitious ‘socialist government’ of 1945? Brideshead was televised in 1981, but Christopher Booker’s devastating documentary ‘City of Towers’ had already gone out in 1978. The decades which have brought new security and cultural status to the country house have also seen the collapse of its initially overwhelming opposition. A ...”

“... though it isn’t – but because description isn’t the novel’s purpose, which is to hope for the moral redemption of his sub-Nabokovian, ex-rapist narrator. At the age of 86, he is returning to the site of his internment on a less than pleasant river-cruise Gulag tour. He has gorged in America, he has had marriages, has made piles of ...”