“... after facing a torrent of racist abuse.) On the second morning, I spoke to a man wearing a black T-shirt with an image of a Crusader and the slogan ‘For England’. He was reluctant to speak to a journalist (‘We hate you’) but relented when I promised not to use his name. (‘I’ll sue you if you do. I’ll go to the Free Speech Union.’) He ...”

“... indulged ‘the family talent for doing nothing much’ until at the end of the war he joined the Black and Tans and went to Ireland where he was seduced by a sergeant, who gave him a make-up box and encouraged him to paint his face. He became a practising homosexual, and developed a dislike of the Protestant Church that culminated in his becoming a Roman ...”

“... the moderation of Isaac Watts and Thomas Hardy as at least as interesting as the wildness of Christopher Smart and W.B. Yeats. I’m not sure how moderate Hardy was – an amiable re-opening of this question was the subject of the postcard from Stanford – but Watts does sound like the unanxious Calvinist, the man who has made his peace with the ...”

“... enticement and resistance, openness and enclosure ... a mesmerising presence’, according to Christopher Woodward (writing in John Soane, Architect, the lavish catalogue of the recent Royal Academy exhibition of Soane’s work). More mundanely, it is regularly identified as the source of one of the most familiar (and also much vandalised) symbols of ...”

“... of actors in the story of globalisation – a trend perhaps most clearly represented in the UK by Christopher Bayly’s The Birth of the Modern World (2004). Chakrabarty, a founding member of the postcolonial collective Subaltern Studies in the 1980s, has developed his own influential critiques of the economic and intellectual legacies of Western ...”

“... didn’t really know or even like but who just happened to be marooned in Oxford out of term.One black mark against Larkin is that he no more cares for the work of Flannery O’Connor than Amis did: ‘The day didn’t get off to a very good start by my reading some stories by “Flannery O’Connor” in the bath … horribly depressing American South ...”

“... in the critical population has produced. So it seems, at any rate, to my generation. Recently Christopher Norris has been meditating, with his usual tact, the resemblances and differences between the Empson of The Structure of Complex Words and the Paul de Man of Allegories of Reading – a sign, perhaps, that the most neglected (and most theoretical) of ...”

“... includes a typically coloured plan and perspective for a memorial hall of 1919, black-bordered in grief.) Like all the soldier-survivors of that generation, Clough knew that homes for heroes meant rehousing the whole of the working class: Not brick and tile, but wood, thatch, walls of mixed Material, and buildings in plain strength ...”

“... mother until the war ended in 1945. ‘My grandmother … was an old woman, squat, fierce and black-clad like the granny in the Giles cartoons in the Sunday Express,’ Carter wrote in an essay published in 1976. ‘I think I became the child she had been, in a sense, for the first five years of my life … tough, arrogant and pragmatic.’ Carter never ...”

“... to publish. ‘My book problems are complicated and I would like to ask your advice,’ he told Christopher Ricks. ‘My new book is a small one, some eighty poems … the story of changing marriages, not a malice or sensation, far from it, but necessarily, according to my peculiar talent, very personal. Lizzie is naturally very much against it. I am ...”

“... and on 30 January he tweeted a denunciation of his intelligence chiefs Dan Coats, Gina Haspel and Christopher Wray: they were ‘naive’ for telling the Senate that Iran wasn’t working on a nuclear weapon. Half of Trump’s argument for exiting the agreement Obama signed with Iran in 2015, along with the UK, France, China, Russia and Germany, was that the ...”

“... like a thousand white angels dividing on the road, flees to the mountain! She, perfectly cold, and black, gives chase. ‘Memory’ is an extensive poem opening up large tracts of grazing far from the designated sites of family business, before ending at the bottom of a river-bed. It is so ‘ambiguous’, so dense, that there is no chance of putting too ...”

“... blue, its spine adorned with the familiar gilt coat of arms; the Middleton is clad in unornamented black, suggesting a sly homage to the author’s early prose satire The Black Book, with its sardonic farewell to the reader: ‘Now sir, what is your censure now? You have read me, I am sure. Am I ...”

“... and nowhere else. This is called ‘non-referential’ – I think nonsensically. The genealogy of black dogs from which the book takes its title and which is reiterated throughout – Pawel ... had brought Perkun with him from Lithuania and on request exhibited a kind of pedigree, which made it clear to whom it may concern that Perkun’s grandmother on her ...”

“... almost a thousand scientists had detected evidence of gravitational waves emanating from a pair of black holes 1.3 billion light years from Earth. It was empirical confirmation of Einstein’s theory of general relativity. The observation required astonishing technical precision: the 4 km-long arms of each of the two branches of Ligo, three thousand miles ...”