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“... the Little Capacon River. My friend was saying that a lot of the American poets right now, like Robert Hass, the Poet Laureate, are not actually writing poetry at all: ‘they’re involved in a warding off of the poetic moment,’ he said, ‘they see that they have something in their hand, then they talk it away.’ The road was winding and narrow, and we ...”

“... The​ Soft Machine drummer, Robert Wyatt, his Cockney tenor cracking with fervour, once sang:I’m nearly five foot seven tallI like to smoke and drink and ballI’ve got a yellow suit that’s made by Pamand every day I like an egg and some teabut most of all I like to talk about me.The American poet Wallace Stevens liked his tea – he took to it in connoisseurship and prudence, ‘imported tea’ every afternoon, ‘with some little tea wafers’, partly in order to ease himself off martinis (Elsie, his ‘Pam’, disapproved of his drinking) – but otherwise everything is different ...”

“... and a vigorous force on the folk music scene.) In 1935, the year of the general election, Robert Conquest stood as the Communist candidate in the mock election at Winchester and Frank deputised for him during the campaign. Some of the teachers were happy to see the boys thinking along these lines – or thinking at all about the drastic turn that ...”

“... the Love Child of Camilla Parker-Bowles and Wayne Rooney. She who every morning plays a gallant Robert Browning to my late-rising, half-paralytic Elizabeth Barrett – get thee up from thy bed, thou fat lazy kitten-slug, and take that nun’s twat off thy head. Here, I’ve bought thee a clip-on pedometer and thou wilt walk ten thousand steps up and down ...”

“... entered the federal prison on McNeil Island in Puget Sound, where he discovered Scientology, read Robert Heinlein’s science fiction novel Stranger in a Strange Land, and first heard the Beatles. From Scientology, he took ideas that he would combine with Carnegie’s: let the other fellow think he was an immortal spiritual being; exploit his traumatic ...”

“... the Prisoner of Chillon tells us, ‘no feeling – none –/Among the stones I stood a stone’). In his storytelling, Byron likes both to withhold information and provide too much of it, sometimes contriving ambiguity for ambiguity’s sake. In The Giaour, one character’s ‘swarthy visage spake distress’ – ‘but,’ Byron adds, ‘this ...”

“... decades car fumes altered the college façades, making them dark and gothic rather than honeyed stone. The cars needed more roads, the workers who built the cars needed places to live, and Betjeman feared the class politics all this entailed: as the factory grew, workers from across the country moved in, notably from South Wales, where they were politically ...”

“... of his country in the aftermath of the Nicaraguan earthquake. Winding it up came a warning from Robert Bork against the menace of the ‘clerisy of power’ now (under the Ford Presidency) steering the nation towards the shoals of equality and uniformity. The following bumper issue of the National Review, on 5 December, was mainly taken up with the text of ...”

“... for London’s waste. There isn’t much romance in an ordinary boat being rammed, sinking like a stone – with no time for heroism or cowardice or stories of any sort – and leaving survivors bobbing for a few minutes in shit. The Titanic and her sister ships, on the other hand, were the crowning glory of the century of progress. A White Star Line poster ...”

“... to the power of editors. After reading Sidney Colvin’s edition of the letters of his friend Robert Louis Stevenson, he wrote: ‘One has the vague sense of omissions and truncations – one smells the thing unprinted.’ In the years after James’s death, his family in the United States was concerned about his reputation, especially about what Edel ...”

“... Duse ‘almost concealed’ it: ‘She takes her great anguish and lays it in a tomb and rolls a stone before the door.’ Cather gravitated towards Duse, Acocella suggests, because the Italian actress’s understated style came closest to expressing Cather’s own evolving impulse as a novelist: to convey meaning subtly, through oblique hints and ...”

“... both of whom died before she was nineteen. She had one child, John, with her first partner; two, Robert and Shannon, with her second; and two more, Chloe and William, with her third. By the time William was born, Christine had endured beatings, depression and at least one suicide attempt. She drank heavily and abused amphetamines.William was placed on the ...”

“... esoteric alchemical messages relating to the search for the Grand Oeuvre or Philosopher’s Stone. Nothing in his recovered papers lends credence to this hypothesis, or points to the existence of some ultimate key to the Rousselian. His fanatically worked manuscripts demonstrate, rather, an intense, almost Flaubertian obsession with the mot juste, a ...”

“... for the novels of J.M. Barrie and Arthur Ransome, for Emil and the Detectives and The Sword in the Stone. And he was much pre-occupied with writing a string quartet about his schooldays, with movements given titles like ‘P.T.’ and ‘Ragging’. His emotional life centred on his mother. Mrs Britten – ‘darling mummy ... angel of my heart’ – was ...”

“... But as the preparations for Tadic’s trial dragged on, and no bigger cases were brought, Gold-stone found it increasingly difficult to persuade the media that in Tadic he was prosecuting someone of significance. After the seven-month trial, in which the world soon lost interest, we now hear less of this post hoc rationalisation. Indeed, in the corridors ...”