“... of the poets – Charles Tomlinson, or David Gascoyne, or Robert Conquest, or John Holloway, or Christopher Middleton, or Geoffrey Hill – stood for a world that was fully England. Looking at the list of poets was like having one’s Irish nose pushed up against the polished glass of a posh window in some imaginary Big House. But it was clear to me that ...”

“... these prodigious gatherings, the poetry looks svelte. Yet the 2015 Faber edition of the Poems by Christopher Ricks and Jim McCue itself runs to nearly two thousand densely annotated pages. This, too, is a breathtaking achievement. Very few people will read through all these thousands of pages, and their publication risks making Eliot seem more daunting than ...”

“... the 1960s and after by Kingsley Amis and Robert Conquest. It also contains a letter from Amis to Christopher Hitchens, which is needling enough (‘Do you admire terror? I know you admire freedom’) in the rhetorical pressure it applies on an old friend to renounce Lenin, Trotsky and all their works, but ends by sending ‘fraternal love, as always’. Amis ...”

“... arose when the music was ‘arranged’, generally by someone (first name forgotten) Hartley. No hope of following the tune through Hartley’s flights of fancy and Dad would (mildly) curse and put down his fiddle. In Sunday Half Hour, which generally followed, the hymns were not arranged so Hartley was never a problem.1 September. The papers slightly ...”

“... TV series in the 1970s, with Anthony Valentine as a notably suave and sinister Raffles and Christopher Strauli as a frightened Bunny. The combination of mannered elegance and genuine nervous tension never fails.Ernest William Hornung, always known as Willie, was born in Middlesbrough in 1866, the youngest of eight children of a coal merchant from ...”

“... laughter lived on, of course, in his friends’ memories as well as in his books. Leader reports Christopher Hitchens, at Amis’s memorial service in 1996, recalling an occasion when Amis performed several of his most celebrated ‘imitations’: ‘He made all his noises, and by all I don’t just mean the Metropolitan Line train approaching the station at ...”

“... Dryden: A Literary Life (1991) asserts that Dryden could most certainly have realised his early hope to ‘make the world some part of amends for many ill plays by an heroic poem’. Hammond goes on: The writing of an heroic poem was thwarted, however, not by any lack of abilities on Dryden’s part, but by his failure to find patronage. What might easily ...”

“... at stake is minuscule, or meaningless. As Matt Levine, who along with his Bloomberg colleague Christopher Beam is one of the sharpest analysts of prediction markets, put it: ‘One “accomplishment” of modern prediction markets is that they can, in theory, allow for an arbitrarily large amount of betting on arbitrarily small quantities of ...”

“... had formed the Royal Naval Division, secured Brooke a place in it and sent it east, in the hope of helping Russia by taking Constantinople and opening up the Black Sea. In the weeks after Brooke’s death landings were finally made on the Gallipoli peninsula and many of his battalion were gunned down by Turks positioned on the high ground; 11 of its 15 ...”

“... Because We Put Chicken in Pasta. Everyone agreed that it was fine to make fun of Italians. Was Christopher Columbus the reason?A conversation with a future grandchild. She lifts her eyes, as blue as willow ware. The tips of her braids twitch with innocence. ‘So you were all calling each other bitch, and that was funny, and then you were all calling each ...”

“... Britain returned most of its gains to the Netherlands in exchange for keeping the Cape of Good Hope and some minor territories in Latin America. In 1817, his glory days seemingly over, Raffles became the lieutenant-governor of Bencoolen, a miserable penal colony and pepper trading post on the west coast of Sumatra. Back in London, he had moved in the ...”

“... calm of mind all passion spent’ – l is dominant, and this allows, subliminally, for a hope that in the future a voice might again say ‘Let there be light.’ Also in the last line of Paradise Lost – ‘Through Eden took their solitary way’ – the consonant Milton prized above all others, the l in the centre of his name, stands out. The ...”

“... had more or less impermeable walls and its contents were more or less homogeneous. Christopher Hann, discussing what he called the ‘Malinowski period’ of early field anthropology, in Social Anthropology (one of the volumes in the Teach Yourself series), underlined the emphasis laid by Malinowski and his disciples and students on the ...”

“... he composed in ‘a naive fashion’, Messiaen replied: ‘Please don’t take it as an insult. I hope I am also naive and will remain so as long as I live.’)Messiaen’s​ impact on the European avant-garde of the postwar years was so profound that Grisey called him ‘God the Father’. Yet he left behind no ‘school’ of composition and was nearly as ...”

“... letters would enshrine his reputation; an edition of those was released in 2008, edited by Christopher Reid. I am not sure this enshrinement has come to pass. His reputation still rests on the phrase ‘sudden sharp hot stink of fox’, and Birthday Letters, read at a distance of 27 years, contains too much careful positioning to really count as ...”