“... with High Windows and inscribed it: ‘From a drought to a flood.’What a put-down.Lowell took it as a compliment.I’m sure he would. From this costive Englishman.Yes, a tribute to his fertility.You carried your preoccupation with Lowell from the ‘Review’ to the ‘New Review’, didn’t you? How did the latter magazine come into existence?The ...”

“... She said that from the time she was five years old to the time she was 12, her father regularly took her from her bed in the middle of the night and carried her out to his barn. There would be many men there, and some women; they all wore gowns and hats ‘resembling a Viking hat with horns’. There would be blood every-where, and pitchforks in the ...”

“... person, once launched on adult life? Spurling observes of the biography he produced after the war, John Aubrey and His Friends, that ‘for all the author’s evident respect and affection, its subject never comes to life as Aubrey makes his own subjects do.’ How far can the same be said of her account of him? Good-natured, amusing, affable, to many he also ...”

“... with Cameron’s description of this as a ‘slight fall’. After the letters were published, John McDonnell hailed the prime minister as a convert to the anti-austerity cause. The unedifying spectacle of a prime minister ignorant of the impact of his own government’s policies, or so taken in by his ministers’ rhetoric that he could not reconcile ...”

“... like the International Monetary Fund and the World Trade Organisation.But when the younger Bush took office he appointed foreign policy advisers who took a less sanguine view of America’s situation in the world. Bush’s war cabinet and its support staff saw nothing but ‘growing threats to the American peace ...”

“... gave them debentures worth £3000, a not inconsiderable sum in those days. At one point, he took an ailing Vivienne alone on holiday to Torquay and then, called back to London after five days, paid Eliot’s train fare and hotel expenses so that she wouldn’t want for company. And while Russell was still in Torquay, he received yet another letter of ...”

“... we shall see, involved first falling more deeply asleep. Work on this project stopped in 1929. He took it up again when he returned to Paris, a refugee, in 1934. The notecards multiplied, new dossiers were started, prospectuses for a book now grandly entitled ‘Paris, Capital of the 19th Century’ were sent to friends. Baudelaire loomed larger in ...”

“... around the world. The starriest guest at the rally was Robinson’s admirer Elon Musk, who took part by video link. Simion’s presence was barely noticed amid the British MAGA wannabes eagerly partaking of the martyrdom of Charlie Kirk. Simion himself paid tribute to Kirk in his brief speech. He marched onto the temporary stage on Whitehall wearing a ...”

“... foreigner in crumpled battledress. He came to know Spender, Orwell, MacNeice, Philip Toynbee and John Lehmann, and was invited to their parties. The Tribune left-wingers adored him; Michael Foot (as he put it himself) ‘fell an immediate swooning victim to his wit, charm and inordinate capacity for alcohol’, and to his murderous style of ...”

“... and where by the early 1920s both the poet laureate Robert Bridges and the future poet laureate John Masefield had established themselves in suburban comfort. Graves lived from 1919 to 1921 in Dingle Cottage at the bottom of Masefield’s garden. I walk my dog past the cottage quite often. It’s set down in a marshy hollow which has a faint air of primal ...”

“... to stop jostling for advantage and to start brooding on revenge. ‘Victories and defeats,’ as John Stoessinger put it, summarising Kissinger’s thinking, ‘merely lead to other wars. Only a settlement without victory or defeat could lead to stability.’ Talk of national honour was a useful holding device, because honour could never be satisfied: it ...”

“... with becoming a plumber or hairdresser or sushi chef. It would support a view of authorship like John Gregory Dunne’s, who described writing for a living as ‘a job, like laying pipe’.Imitating Authors describes two developments over the past three centuries that helped imitation lose its old sense and take a pejorative turn. The first is the ...”

“... individual class membership, but rather to explain why collective action and social conflict took the forms they did. Next, however, there has been a frontal attack on his use of class as the key factor for understanding social conflict. Dahrendorf and others have argued that class, being based on property, is less fundamental than power for the ...”

“... who among other things improvised a more edifying ending to Jane Eyre (Jane ended up with St John Rivers), to the larger-than-life adoptive mother who among other things improvised a more edifying ending to Jane Eyre? Then there’s the rhetorical preening of Winterson’s last paragraph, which affects to pass her mother the microphone. If this ...”

“... with respect to the British Bomb was closely held. The key players were Churchill, Lindemann and John Anderson, a senior minister in the war cabinet. They were in turn dependent on the experts’ constantly changing, often conflicting views as to whether an atomic bomb was possible and, if so, what it would do and how it might be used, how much it would ...”