“... was impossible to add fresh horror to the story of Mary killing her mother, but that was before I read Wilson’s version:Chairs, crockery, peas, beef, and bread on the floor; mother, bloody from chest to waist, lifeless; father, forehead gashed, bellowing; Aunt Sarah flinching in the corner. Mary towers over the riot, her eyes animal-wild. She has a ...”

“... doorstep. With Pickard’s encouragement, Bunting was tied into the writing scene in Newcastle (he read several times at the newly opened Morden Tower), he found publishers for some of his old poems, and even began writing again. His long poem Briggflatts was written on a commuter train; the last of his ‘sonatas’ (it’s only twenty pages), it was cut down ...”

“... Faustus, Adrian Leverkühn’s music is clearly based on Schönberg’s 12-tone compositions. Alma read the book and immediately told Schönberg she was very upset at the way Mann had appropriated his music. She then rang Mann and told him that Schönberg was angry about the misuse of his ‘intellectual property’ – thanks to Alma, he now was. She went ...”

“... of her family, so was ‘familiar’ in that sense, but ‘when the Compiler found how many well-read persons were unable to name the author of even the most familiar passage’, she felt the need to provide a volume of these ‘familiar quotations’. Quotations are ‘familiar’ in that strange and slightly coercive sense of being ‘stuff that ...”

“... a title borrowed by Dennison for this new biography, though actually after you’ve read a dozen or so of them their twists cease to be at all unexpected. Dennison’s biography has the virtues of clarity and brevity, but despite declaring itself ‘unofficial’, which might suggest it offers shocking new revelations, it adds little to the very ...”

“... furniture in their drawing room, turning the ‘cosy nooks and corners’ inside out and getting Donald to help him shift the piano. This was, in essence, what he did for the rest of his life, putting objects and people – often making little distinction between those categories – into relationships such that a certain mood or effect would be ...”

“... much part of the movement as Ed Dorn, Robert Creeley or Kenneth Koch. With his Essex Poems, even Donald Davie, the very type of the English conservative poet-critic, appeared to have capitulated to ‘American’ Modernism, just as the more recent poems of Charles Tomlinson seemed touched by the dotty magniloquence of Charles Olson’s ‘Projective ...”

“... role played by patrons in the formation of public taste, an encomium it would be difficult to read without remembering that all the work in this particular show was purchased or commissioned by Charles Saatchi. No doubt he will be pleased to be compared with Isabella d’Este. If there is a serious theme running through these essays, it concerns the ...”

“... street have given us Camp Bread Basket, another probable icon of infamy. The photos are hard to read. Are the clenched fists and heavy boots caught in midair about to break the bones and bruise the flesh of defenceless prisoners, or are they posed for the camera in a gesture of simulated, lookalike bravado? Are they staged re-enactments of beatings that ...”

“... by the CIA and other agencies, a process known as ‘stovepiping’. This means that Dick Cheney, Donald Rumsfeld and Paul Wolfowitz judge the veracity of reports from the field themselves (or with their staffers) without the information having first been ‘subjected to rigorous scrutiny’, and then rush the most damning reports into speeches, such as those ...”

“... with a TV and a mattress on the floor. ‘And every day I’d wake up at 5.30 a.m., and then I’d read five hundred emails, right there, on the floor.’Stevenson had stopped caring. He was transferred to Japan, and still didn’t care; he spent an excruciating period negotiating his departure from a highly reluctant Citibank. He was depressed and burned ...”

“... in placing Unitarianism within a wider tradition of dissenting Christianity; but in truth, as Donald Davie robustly maintained in A Gathered Church (1978), it hardly does justice to the enormous heterodoxy of Unitarianism to think of it as a form of Christianity at all. Certainly Coleridge came to think in that way. According to a story recorded by his ...”

“... 2016 when Steele was reportedly paid $168,000 by an American firm called Fusion GPS to investigate Donald Trump, who had recently won the Republican presidential nomination. Fusion GPS was founded by Glenn Simpson and Peter Fritsch, former reporters for the Wall Street Journal who had made their careers out of delving into Russian corruption. The project was ...”

“... had effectively exploited the so-called missile gap for his own electoral purposes, Ellsberg read a highly classified National Intelligence Estimate (NIE) on the subject and discovered that it had all been a lie: there was a gap but it was ten to one in favour of the US. This, he said, had ‘a shocking effect on my professional worldview’. There were ...”

“... keep paying his party dues, but not under his own name. Although Feklisov says that Julius had ‘read the great classics of socialism, Marx, Engels, Lenin … during our meetings his statements had a childish revolutionary naiveté, which was part of his personality … “I don’t know if I’ll live long enough to see gold-plated urinals,” he would tell ...”