“... played, says Ditie, the uncle always puts on his old Habsburg uniform when he goes out to chop wood. This is not so far, in impulse, from Hanta, the narrator of Too Loud a Solitude, who longs to run around the track at Olympia in his long johns, fulfilling his dream of the Greek ideal of athleticism. What is moving about all these characters is the ...”

“... I could have had more), from Eshleman, from H.R. Hays, from Ed Dorn and Gordon Brotherston, from Michael Smith and Valentino Gianuzzi, from Margaret Sayers Peden and now from Margaret Jull Costa. None is the English Vallejo. What frustrates their enterprise is an inability to decide what matters and what doesn’t. They end up not seeing the ...”

“... in hand sometimes caused her to lose perspective: she focused on the trees and did not notice the wood. The basic failure of the 1964-70 Labour Government lay in its inability to secure the economic growth it had promised. The National Plan, published in September 1965, was posited on a 25 per cent increase in national output between 1964 and 1970 – an ...”

“... Edward Crankshaw and C.A. Lejeune, a socially and intellectually glamorous world, particularly to Michael Frayn, one of a group of us who went to the exhibition. But, of course, London itself was beginning to seem glamorous then – the Coffee House in Northumberland Avenue, the Soup Kitchen in Chandos Place, films at the Academy on Oxford Street and suppers ...”

“... went one better and procured the body, according to Macintyre, of a down and out Welshman, Glyndwr Michael, a 34-year-old vagrant found dead in January 1943 in an abandoned warehouse. Michael had either intentionally or mistakenly drunk a concoction called Battle’s Vermin Killer, which contained white phosphorus, a toxic ...”

“... the valley below the station, is one of the best and most original of all Victorian churches. St Michael and All Angels is almost as impressive. It has a complicated building history: Bodley was responsible for the first church of 1858, Burges designed the additions which were completed by 1893. Its high, black and red brick walls frown darkly on the ...”

“... and fell into the middle of the room with me underneath it. I knew the face framed by that rickety wood. I’d seen it before, in that frame, and I knew who it was: my grandfather Michael. I knew that’s who it was though I’d never met him. The grandfather was covered in dust and damp patches dried in. But that was ...”

“... which he, a Jew, had experienced at first hand, in Austria, Germany and Holland. As his friend Michael Hamburger wrote, ‘no wonder Jakov Lind has become a specialist in the monstrous!’ The Continent was insupportable, he couldn’t live in Israel, indomitable Churchillian England was the place for him. And yet what brought him over was the most ...”

“... A memory of the retreat from Moscow, or some fresh threat or promise? Some German Birnam Wood? The barrettes (think Wagner) and velvety tunics of some of his humans – you would have to call them deuteragonists – were actually elements of a (forbidden) neo-medieval uniform indicating liberal political opposition, the one that lost to ...”

“... she performed at Carnegie Hall and spoke from the platform during the March on Washington. (Ean Wood wonders if Langston Hughes, who knew Baker in Paris in the 1920s, had her in mind when he included the verse ‘Look at that gal shake that thing./We can’t all be Martin Luther King’ in the second edition of his anthology, The Poetry of the Negro; the ...”

“... 19 March. It got going just before 10 a.m. and lasted until nearly one o’clock. Anyone who knows Michael Heseltine knows that he is a rapid dispatcher of business, even by senior ministerial standards. To spend three hours wondering how to answer a couple of letters is blue-moonish, and speaks volumes about the concern to hide. ‘This was a long meeting by ...”

“... has generally been supposed. Later on, a cluster of young historical ecologists based at Monks Wood Experimental Station, outside Huntingdon, deepened and widened some of Hoskins’s pioneer perceptions, adding support to them with biological data. Beginning to overtake all of these in practical effectiveness, however, is the remarkable figure of Oliver ...”

“... neck, a kicking hind leg, a pair of ears. The forms are concave, as though knocked out of soft wood with a chisel. In a way, his animals are always the same animal: energetic but sleepily lovable (they seem to have closed eyes and adorable eyelashes), active but unthreatening, heroic, emblematic; not individuals but successful prototypes. Closer to God ...”

“... bookshelves. A Constructivist sculpture, like a demonic snowflake, made by King from black painted wood. Soviet artefacts: a silk banner, a crimson alarm clock, hammer-and-sickle badges. A fleet of scarlet filing cabinets holding photographs, documents and journals. And modern objects which nodded to the Reds: a scarlet drawing board, a scarlet rubbish bin, a ...”