“... the Canadian poet, classical scholar, essayist and translator became suddenly prominent in North America; she had found readers in Britain as well by 2001, when The Beauty of the Husband: A Fictional Essay in 29 Tangos won the T.S. Eliot Prize. A memorial to Carson’s late brother, Michael, Nox has found as much attention, and as much praise, as any ...”

“... spoils the effect by having another heroic character call him ‘the whitest Jew since the Apostle Paul’. A self-referential passage in the same book has someone explaining how to write a mystery novel. You take three images at random – ‘say, an old blind woman spinning in the Western Highlands, a barn in a Norwegian saeter, and a little curiosity shop ...”

“... cannot wait.’ And even as critics of the war were focusing their anger on the neo-Jacobinism of Paul Wolfowitz and Co, the old Metternich hand was, as Bob Woodward reported, exerting a ‘powerful, largely invisible influence on Bush’s Iraq policy’, regularly meeting with the president and Cheney, dusting off his old Vietnam-era memos to urge the ...”

“... but also about recent films such as Alien: Resurrection (‘inventive, honest and frank’) and Paul Verhoeven’s Starship Troopers (‘I’ve seen it twice and I like it a lot’).At some point I wrote a fan letter to David Thomson. In his reply, he urged me to develop interests other than film. That was Spielberg’s problem, Thomson said – he didn’t ...”

“... by the return of hostages, the US and allies’ refraining from joint military exercises, and the North Korean destruction of test facilities. The process has only just begun, but the foreign policy establishment, from the Council on Foreign Relations to Fareed Zakaria, have struck an odd posture by declaring peaceful relations with ...”

“... rather than legal consequence. The IPC drew on the ‘famine scales’ drawn up by the scholars Paul Howe and Stephen Devereux. Their prototype had two dimensions. ‘Magnitude’ was measured by the number who had perished from starvation and related causes, and by extension, the total affected population. ‘Severity’ measured the intensity of ...”

“... Harold Acton and John Lehmann, were Old Etonians. The first million-selling paperback was Paul Brickhill’s The Dam Busters in 1956, while Kingsley Amis received £100 for Lucky Jim. There is a wonderful description by a friend of Virginia Woolf’s who arrived at her flat to find Woolf and Edith Sitwell, between whom relations were somewhat ...”

“... dance of the intellect, if you will, and in these qualities have an affinity with the painting of Paul Klee. His syntax plays a critical role, with its orderings, the alternating presences and absences, its copulae or want of; clauses gone floating from the main substantive and verb; periodicity, abrupt declarative bursts. The poems have a tense, torqued ...”

“... be compatible with nominal British sovereignty or even continued Protestant supremacy in the North? It isn’t clear that British politicians appreciated these nuances, though some officials, including Michael Oatley, the MI6 man on the ground, certainly did. The principal IRA objective was an invitingly lowish hurdle, and should have been seen as ...”

“... Arthur Rimbaud wrote the works and letters attributed to him. Or that he was born in 1854 in north-eastern France and died in Marseille in 1891, having spent the latter part of his life in Africa. Or that he was a teenage poet who stopped writing when he was twenty. But then what is the relation of a historical person to a work that scarcely ever seems ...”

“... and the war in Vietnam come as news from outside. He writes of his own frustrations, of Garvey, Paul Robeson and Toussaint. The letters have been through the censor; and many things must therefore be addressed obliquely. As the months pass, the politically conscious character who is making himself physically and mentally strong is subdued by ...”

“... illuminate the text, so that John O’Leary (revolutionary), Daniel Crilly (Irish Party Member for North Mayo) and Fanny Parnell (patriotic poet and sister of Charles Stewart) take on an almost fictive existence, like characters in a novel. Herbert Horne and Yeats’s view of him, Yeats’s ‘hushed, musical, eerie’ manner of speaking on that night in ...”

“... communion as well as of class. In a study which includes the narrow sect of the Close Brethren of North-East Scotland, reputed today, perhaps untruly, to indulge in contemporary culture only through television-sets installed in cupboards, the doctrinaire Free Presbyterian communities of the Long Island, as well as women gutters who had their own way of life ...”

“... salute to a crowd of thirty thousand inside and outside Madison Square Garden, eclipsing Paul Robeson and Dean Acheson. An awestruck young Alistair Cooke reported in the Guardian that ‘he looks like a divinity and he looks like the portrait on every dollar bill.’ The resemblance to George Washington is undeniable, although there is a creepy hint ...”

“... recasting of relations with Washington, until Bush placed Iran in the ‘axis of evil’ alongside North Korea and Saddam’s Iraq. Obama, too, recognised Soleimani as an adversary who might eventually become a partner, if not an ally.Trump and his secretary of state, Mike Pompeo, who lobbied for Soleimani’s assassination against the advice of Trump’s ...”