“... he ties around his waist. His first thought is to reclaim his house, which was seized by Settler Williams with the help of his servant, John Boy, both of whom pursued him into the bush, where they spent years tracking him until he finally managed to kill them. On his return, Matigari can tell almost immediately that ...”

“... Corona’ to her, and years later preached at her funeral. In 1609 she was remarried, to Sir John Danvers, a cultured and attractive gentleman half her age; the marriage was evidently a happy one, and George Herbert enjoyed a close relationship with his young stepfather. Walton depicts Magdalen as a helicopter parent, at least in the case of her eldest ...”

“... subject matter and literary strategy, following the frankly homoerotic early stories of Tennessee Williams.’ Hmm – if you’re following in the footsteps of an earlier writer can you be said to be opening doors? And if Purdy was bold to follow in his wake, how is Williams’s own courage to be assessed?...”

“... last poems.) From the time he went at the age of 18 to Vanderbilt and attracted the attention of John Crowe Ransom and Robert Penn Warren it was glory all the way until he enlisted in the services a decade later. When in 1934 Allen Tate put together a poetry supplement for a magazine, it included several poets with firm reputations, but was headed by five ...”

“... for figurative language is a feature of his style, and also a pointer to his critical interests. John Ashbery’s poetry is said to be ‘like an electrotherapy relieving the stiff neck of the sublime, and helping our numbness to speak’. Does our cultural plight put us in a madhouse or a massage parlour here? Hartman is thinking about his style, not our ...”

“... Convention was a glamorous performance. But at one point, trying to reproach the Democrats with John Adams’s phrase ‘Facts are stubborn things,’ he slipped and declared instead: ‘Facts are stupid things.’ At the moment he wished to invoke an intransigent, incontrovertible reality which would supposedly confound his enemies and bear out the ...”

“... for instance, Burns Singer, one of the most original poets of the Fifties, or David Wright and John Heath-Stubbs. All three were friends of Graham, and their inclusion might have helped the Forties and Fifties out of their New Apocalypse v. Movement stand-off. Hamish Henderson, whose 1948 Elegies for the Dead in Cyrenaica (reprinted by Polygon in ...”

“... Mick. Like brothers. Like evil sisters in disguise. A two-headed beast. The opposite of Paul and John. The dark and the light. I’ve always been pulled toward darkness. Toward black. Toward death. Toward the South. Good. Now I’m heading the right direction. Away from the quaint North. Away from lobsters and white churches and Civil War graveyards and ...”

“... attention. We have the story of the actor’s coughing off the stage a melodrama based on Caleb Williams; and a just appraisal of Mrs Siddons’s superior powers as a performer. We hear of her brother, with his poor singing voice, ‘murdering’ Grétry – the word is the Irish tenor Michael Kelly’s – and we witness a number of total theatrical ...”

“... and then, without bothering to consult the operational War Diaries, proceeds to spin out the John Connell-Correlli Barnett myth that Montgomery’s only contribution to the Desert arena was an incomprehensible uplift in morale. Monty’s plan for the defence of Alam Halfa, he declares, was inherited from Auchinleck: he neglects to mention that ...”

“... at Number 10 was more like a medieval court, a centre of intrigue and morbid suspicion. Marcia Williams, as she then was, had a sharp political intelligence as well as a commanding personality, but some of the others were dreadful toadies. On one occasion, during Wilson’s first year, I told one of my Transport House contacts that perhaps the Prime ...”

“... But he does his best to enliven things with biographical vignettes. The revelation that John Ashbery was a radio Quiz Kid at the age of 14 does nothing to undermine my prejudices against his work, but the ever-catholic Perkins gives a sympathetic introduction. How far, though, is the book a history? By continual cross-cutting, Perkins gives an idea ...”

“... of his own disappearance into fiction. As he watches the rehearsals for I Am a Camera, the play John van Druten made from the Isherwood material, Isherwood thinks a good deal – sometimes comically, sometimes sentimentally – about the relation of art to life. In writing Goodbye to Berlin I destroyed a certain portion of my real past. I did this ...”

“... Both Christianity and Islam have traditionally disapproved of short selling. In 2008 Rowan Williams spoke out against it, and his fellow archbishop John Sentamu compared short sellers to ‘bank robbers’. (In the event it transpired that the Church of England’s pension fund had been earning fees for lending out ...”

“... or jottings on the backs of envelopes. Books bought in Cambridge from the libraries of Raymond Williams, Dadie Rylands, Tony Tanner, Jack Lindsay and other luminaries. Even the most unassuming books prompted recollections. They composed a sort of biography, each one acting like a door in an advent calendar, opening on to some moment in the past.Still, they ...”