“... Durcan’s Going home to Russia, coming two years after The Berlin Wall Café contains 48 poems; Peter Redgrove’s In the Hall of the Saurians, one year after its predecessor, has 34; Norman MacCaig’s Voice-over, three years on from his Collected Poems, has 58; Cat’s Whisker by Philip Gross (three years on) 41; Jouissance by William Scammell (two ...”

“... elegant interior. It’s a sort of Christmas cake of a building, with dark panelling and white stucco icing, but the only hints of the season were the looping boughs of fir hung from the galleries. Outside, however, hundreds of men in Santa suits (who knows why?) were rushing around Trafalgar Square. The giant Norwegian fir that stands there every ...”

“... it made Self momentarily speechless. ‘Belly of an architect,’ he said, using the title of the Peter Greenaway movie to express his amazement. ‘A pool is water, made available and useful, and is, as such, infinitely soothing to the Western eye,’ Joan Didion said. She was writing about California, where pools, in her view, were less a symbol of ...”

“... jelly? I said. In your book you said you’d found inside one of these circles a blob of luminous white jelly and it was a completely unidentifiable substance.It was shaped somewhat, one of them said, like a Mars Bar. But it was not! it was not! children’s confectionery. Since scientific tests showed it contained no glucose.Only This Morning, said the other ...”

“... night for two years and recorded their conversations – but by Helen Pluckrose, James Lindsay and Peter Boghossian, three pranksters who may or may not have ever visited a Hooters but who became internet famous, and soon afterwards New York Times famous, for their comprehensive ridiculing of the standards of editing and peer review at Sex Roles and a whole ...”

“... Travelling in the Andean highlands of Peru some thirty years ago, Peter Matthiessen observed a group of drunken Quechua Indians. ‘In this state the Quechua looks more slack-jawed and brutish than the most primitive man imaginable.’ The Indians were ‘rife with hatreds and resentments ... But they are so subdued by their own poverty, and by their failure to realise how very numerous they are, that a Quechua revolution, while one day inevitable, remains remote ...”

“... Tasmania’s prodigal son, Peter Conrad, suggested recently that his island-state had ‘unwritten its own history’ in accordance with ‘a self-protective incuriosity about origins’. Tasmania’s origins lay in an act of genocidal conquest and a penal experiment, both of which were so recent and so omnipresent in their effect as to make recollection intolerable ...”

“... firm Measures that make his Nato allies squirm. Snow falls again. The atmosphere turns white. The airfields of East Anglia are socked in. The atom bombers will not fly tonight. Tonight the Third World War will not begin. There’s so much concentrated heat and light Stored around here that if they pulled the pin The British Isles would be ...”

“... Museum of Ireland’s permanent display in Dublin, in the pages of many books and articles. (Peter Adam’s Eileen Gray: Her Life and Work, revised in 2009, remains the best introduction.) But despite the photographs and exhibitions and the commercial as well as scholarly rediscovery of her work in recent decades, I cannot quite shake the suspicion that ...”

“... grown up around the Second World War, and even at the prime minister (although the groundwork for Peter Cook’s brutal takedown of Harold Macmillan had already been laid by The Goon Show’s Peter Sellers with his sketch ‘Party Political Speech’, which was released as the B-side of a single two years before Beyond the ...”

“... diasporic circles. The Jamaican poet Mutabaruka responded with his own performance poem, ‘White Man Country’, whose central refrain Johnson quoted in a piece in the Guardian in 2005: ‘it no good fi stay inna white man country too long.’ The piece is collected in Time Come, a selection of Johnson’s prose from ...”

“... Iread​ Peter Biskind’s book about the New Hollywood, Easy Riders, Raging Bulls, long ago. Apart from scraps of celebrity anecdote, what I remember of it now is something more diffuse, a mood associated with the mysterious figures of the producers: an impression of flared trousers and shirts with the two top buttons undone, collar points two feet apart, of tanned white skin, gold, nice teeth, the smell of tobacco and aftershave and deodorant, of men outwardly confident, hungry, vain, bullying, concupiscent and covetous, but also charming, garrulous, fascinating, prone to infatuations with strangers and their stories, flitting from one intense interest to another, even as they held on stubbornly to ideas for years until the money and the creatives could be married and a film born ...”

“... Foot resembled an Old Testament prophet. An impression which, in later life, his shock of white hair, the passion of his delivery and the magnificence of his rhetoric served only to enhance. Born a year before the outbreak of World War One into a prominent West Country Liberal family and brought up in a world of erudition, radical politics and ...”

“... Parliament by the monarch. Like Boris Johnson, Rees-Mogg is fond of bogus erudition – the Brexit white paper was, he said, ‘the greatest vassalage since King John paid homage to Philip II at Le Goulet in 1200’ – and he must have enjoyed expressing his hope that it would ‘not be necessary for Her Majesty’s stay at Sandringham to be interrupted by ...”

“... only so much damage one can do with a Robert Frost interview, but that didn’t stop the late Peter Matthiessen, one of the founding editors, from now and then leaving the office, or the Himalayas, to spy on supposed enemies of the United States. Matthiessen later said he had used the magazine as cover for some high-level snitching, but in the annals of ...”