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“... present and past         that one may say ‘has been’       drunk and (I guess, not having seen it) sober             a half century at words for animals, people, plants the planet.         ‘Have you a story?’ Every poet who has read with Reading has ...”

“... after hour in a weird kind of unresisting infant heat, then for no reason you cool, flicker out. I guess for no reason is an arrogant thing to say. For no reason I can name is what I mean. It was a few years ago now I gave you a woman, a real mouthful of salt and you like salt. Her story, Phaidra’s story, that old story, came in as a free wave and crashed on ...”

“... a statistician in the Education Department. There were also the Dronkes, the Steiners, the people who founded the chamber music society. There was Karl Popper. Mostly they were reduced to doing jobs nothing like as responsible as those they had left. Popper, at Canterbury, objected to teaching basic logic, but he and others, like Peter Munz ...”

“... its revival coincides with the publication of Sebastian Faulks’s percetive study of three men who died young, the painter Christopher Wood (1901-30), the war hero, Richard Hillary (1919-43), and Jeremy Wolfenden (1934-65) who was (or is?) the most spectacular failure of my Oxford generation. Faulks believes that ...”

“... between Ernest Bevin and Aneurin Bevan, or between Neville Chamberlain and Winston Churchill, who represented conflicting attitudes within the same party. It is not obvious that Mr Macmillan and Mr Butler differed to any great extent on matters of policy. There were disagreements, but on style and details, not content. The reasons for Mr Macmillan’s ...”

“... ever onward, brambles in its hair, dark patches under the trees where no moon was. Which means I guess I can summon all objects from their shelves, sucked with us into the vacuum-cleaner bag the open road is. Quick, tell me a story that I may repeat it with minor variations and the job be over. Rakes and shovels lean beside the open door this evening with a ...”

“... details and without dates: modern conjecture has to supply the historical framework. We can guess something about the heyday: the five survivors date from the second, third and fourth centuries AD, the high summer and sudden autumn of the Imperial peace, when a Greek cultural revival, the Second Sophistic, swept the Empire in a tornado of hot air. We ...”

“... Li Rihua recorded the talk at a dinner party attended by a number of ‘old coastal hands’ who had served as officials in the south-eastern provinces of the Ming empire. Conversation turned to the geopolitics of this sensitive frontier region, its trading enclaves and the various peoples who came to them. He heard ...”

“... well-kept. It’s evidently summertime, and getting late, A little before supper-bell, I’d guess, Or prayers. Another grainy, used-up afternoon. But what about that speck There, to the right, a figure on a bench Perhaps, not looking and yet looking? And who does that dark, motionless dog-shape belong ...”

“... one that writes in zero gravity. Some choose to fend for themselves and walk away, but for those who come through, there is always the second option and if it starts to look too difficult, remember, for one, that no-one here wants this to fail, and, for two, there is nothing to fear: since nobody’s perfect. Just read the instructions and try not to ...”

“... in a ‘be calm’ or ‘stop, take care’ gesture. The same gesture is made both by the woman who looks over the shoulder of the two maids supporting Esther and by the courtier on the right, who also leans forward as he peers round to see what is going on. All the faces in this central group except Esther’s are in ...”

“... They are still turning up: this volume contains letters, formerly unknown, to Robert Mountsier, who later became Lawrence’s agent in the US, and a batch to Douglas Goldring. The volume covers an interesting period. The Lawrences were having a bad time in Cornwall up to October 1917, when they were expelled by the police. Then they were, on the ...”

“... gave her. The sons of Oedipus quarrel; Polynices, exiled in Argos, returns to attack Eteocles, who rules in their native Thebes; in the battle, the brothers kill one another; Creon, the next king, orders that Eteocles be buried as a hero, Polynices left unburied as a traitor; Antigone, the sister of the dead men, defies the order and symbolically buries ...”

“... of both; some in the body of the text and some in the margins. It isn’t always easy to say who is doing the talking. The reader must decide whether he or she is up to sorting everything out and making some kind of whole of it. The prevailing or default mode of the book is verse in short rather rackety and sometimes rickety lines. Frequently it is ...”

“... La Gazette du Cinéma, then capriciously enlisted in the Army and was stationed in Germany, a Jim who became a Jules. He went absent without leave, was imprisoned. He was released after considerable negotiations, thanks largely to the efforts of André Bazin, the film critic and theorist, and a leading influence at the Cahiers du Cinéma. He became one of a ...”