“... where you open with salutations like ‘Hello you no good wenchy slut’, drawn for some reason in rose-garden cursive. But some constraint – perhaps of politeness, perhaps of expectation – is broken in the stories and the memoir. Her real distinction, I came to believe as I read, is of sounding always exactly like herself, which is a better interpretation ...”

“... Several biographies (including that of Wolfgang Leppmann, who takes his cue in this respect from Peter Demetz’s study of 1953) have made much of the young René Rilke’s Pre-Raphaelite affectations, his appearances in an abbé’s black habit on the Prague corso, giving away ‘to the poor’ copies of his first collection of poems; and it is a ...”

“... trumpet above the chancel arch, the dead rising from their tombs in their shrouds; on the left St Peter welcomed the saved into what seemed a rather overcrowded heavenly city; on the right crowned and mitred souls were being dragged in chains to the mouth of hell. On the south wall the archangel Gabriel was weighing a soul in a huge pair of scales; a devil ...”

“... which monitors press reports of the insurgency, the number of military deaths in Balochistan rose from 315 in 2024 to 751 last year. In one spectacular attack in 2025, insurgents hijacked a train and held more than four hundred passengers hostage.The insurgency used to be led by tribal leaders, who have sweeping powers in their local areas. They decide ...”

“... about the constitution, but to worry more generally about the democratic adequacy of humanity’ (Peter Sloterdijk). ‘Brexit shows that the Brussels bureaucracy, that alleged monster that employs no more civil servants than a central German city administration, has done a great job. The extent of interconnectedness at all levels has to be ...”

“... odd, that its innards were normal, that the sacrificer did not stumble, that the meaty smoke rose like Bisto and the animal’s tail curled up to heaven like a happy spreading grin, crackling in the flames. It was not easy to avoid divination in ancient Greece. The key point was to order significance, to prioritise times and places of greatest import and ...”

“... had to commit to the new environment and learn to inhabit it. Swaying like a blanched orchid at a Peter Tosh concert was not good enough. Painful reprimands from minorities, in the workplace, the faculty, the televised debate were the stuff of our re-education as Europeans. By the 1980s, in theory at least, minorities and majorities were on an equal ...”

“... something understood by every human society known to history’. The novelist Christine Brooke-Rose, in an essay resigning her own deuxième carrière as a narratologist, describes narratology as ‘immensely useful. But in the end, it couldn’t cope with narrative and its complexities, except at the price of becoming a separate theoretical ...”

“... a more overtly political play.There may have been another play early on.A one-acter?Yes, possibly.Peter Dale told me you once produced a play at Oxford, a small piece by Harold Pinter.I had started another magazine at Oxford called Tomorrow. And for its fourth issue I’d written to Pinter. He had just become prominent then, but I’d learned about him ...”

“... who recognised his gifts and took him with his other clever boys down the Calton Hill to Rose Street. In those days, a sort of café society still flourished in Edinburgh. You knew which set you’d find in which pub, and young Karl was introduced to the mighty poets of Milne’s Bar and the Abbotsford: Hugh MacDiarmid, Norman MacCaig and Robert ...”

“... Dowie, Jimmy Dyce, Charlie Logan, Margaret Logan, Bert Lumsden, George Manclark, Derek Stubbs, Peter Young and also Alex Falconer’). As this shows, they didn’t all have to be men, but usually they were. There is no doubt that Brown tried to re-create these bonds with groups of personal allies throughout his political career, and he often succeeded. His ...”

“... tradition, Goethe and Schiller, but unlike its sterner English precedents in Westminster Abbey (Peter Scheemakers, 1741) and Stratford (Ronald Gower, 1888), this is a portrait of the writer who circulated sugared sonnets among his private friends. Lessing’s Shakespeare half-sits on his plinth, one foot off the ground, looking quizzically to one side as if ...”

“... were downright surreal. Before the 1997 general election, the Times – under the editorship of Peter Stothard and by this point driven almost mad by its antagonism towards Europe and its commensurate contempt for John Major – refused to endorse a party and instead chose to support whichever candidate was the most Eurosceptic in each constituency. The ...”

“... the book consists of letters: two to Sarah; several to ‘P – ’, who is Hazlitt’s confidant Peter George Patmore; and three to ‘J.S.K. – ’, or James Sheridan Knowles, recounting the final, farcical agonies of the affair. But the printed Liber Amoris is not the only source. There is a manuscript copy of Part One with additions and emendations in ...”

“... Trinity!10 January. In George Lyttelton’s Commonplace Book it’s recorded that Yeats told Peter Warlock that after being invited to hear ‘The Lake Isle of Innisfree’ (a solitary man’s expression of longing for still greater solitude) sung by a thousand Boy Scouts he set up a rigid censorship to prevent anything like that ever happening ...”