“... Mary de Rachewiltz (Pound’s daughter by the American violinist Olga Rudge), and Joanna and David Moody (who is at work on a multi-volume biography of Pound) have chosen to include every message from the poet to his parents in its entirety, however mundane. I suppose one might pause to note from the above the extent to which Pound was open to sharing ...”

“... war. As Levi Eshkol, who was prime minister at the time, put it: ‘We won the war and received a nice dowry of territory, but along with a bride whom we don’t like.’ Israel had to decide what to do with the bride, and what to do with the dowry. The Middle East still lives in the shadow of the decisions Israel made – and those it didn’t – in the ...”

“... I ask you a question?’ he said. ‘Can I ask you what you thought of me when I was a kid?’ ‘Nice,’ said Mr Simpson, rocking. ‘A quiet boy.’ Brian Simpson’s sister looks after him. She brought us tea and a plastic tub of biscuits. ‘I remember,’ he said. ‘I remember’ – and his hands beat a semaphore, as if guiding the words into the room ...”

“... siblings of Paul Gosar, Republican congressman from Arizona, endorse his Democratic opponent, Dr David Brill. In response, Gosar tweets: ‘Like leftists everywhere, they put political ideology before family. Stalin would be proud.’ (Gosar, a former dentist, is notable for his belief that neo-Nazi groups are funded by George Soros, a Jewish Holocaust ...”

“... weight was crushing even for the very finest of its mandarins. The senior Foreign Office official, David Gore-Booth, agreed that answers ‘should be accurate’ but thought that ‘half a picture can be accurate.’ Similarly, the Cabinet Secretary, Sir Robin Butler, thought that it was ‘acceptable in some circumstances for a statement to disclose only part ...”

“... said. To have in your life a problem play, to have it be a problem play because of your life.As David Mitchell notes in his introduction to this reissue of Medusa’s Ankles, the selected stories are as deep and broad as the three decades they cover, though the ones from Sugar and Other Stories (1987) are the most indispensable. Each is different from the ...”

“... looting starts, the shooting starts.’ In July 2017, he advised police officers not to be ‘too nice’ when handling suspects. He praised someone for body-slamming a reporter and encouraged supporters at a rally before the Iowa caucus in 2016 to ‘knock the crap out of’ protesters, saying he would pay their legal fees. He has a history of inciting ...”

“... in this episode and others, the psychology of troops in battle. Holmes quotes Lieutenant David Tinker on his first experience, during the Falklands War, of being shelled: ‘They must be mad. Don’t they know it’s very unsafe shooting things at other people?’ A US Sergeant in Vietnam recalled: ‘You thought, “How the fuck can they do this to ...”

“... readable because animated by all of Grigson’s brilliant erudition and spirit of advocacy. Lord David Cecil’s long chapter in his 1969 book Visionary and Dreamer: Two Poetic Painters (the other one is Burne-Jones) is a more languid affair, but it usefully brought Cecil’s own Romantic instincts to bear on a painter whose inspiration was often professedly ...”

“... a sizeable proportion of the detailed evidence we have about him dates from May and June 1593. For David Riggs, coming to the subject of Marlowe after writing Ben Jonson: A Life (1989), the paucity of material must have been fairly dismaying. The long-lived Jonson went out of his way to make things easy for biographers, leaving an extensive paper trail ...”

“... are free from all ordinary moral constraints; it’s good to be a gangster because it’s nice to be a thug. What the joke says is that being a gangster is a career and a mythology, and that both the fact and fiction of the job are likely to be more than you bargained for. This impression is confirmed by the sense of burlesque in the sequence: the ...”

“... of one of the most extraordinary lives, in any profession, of this century.’ Holden has a nice line in dry understatement, and knows this is the understatement of the decade. What he means is that he and his fellow-toilers in the biographical olive grove have been racing to make sense of the great heap of myth, obfuscation, blarney and coded ...”

“... play. We all have a cup of tea and there’s a lot of laughing, particularly as the actors from David Hare’s The Power of Yes begin to drift out after their matinée. One of them is Simon Williams, a tall distinguished figure, handsome throughout his life just as was his father, whom I remember from a film I saw as a child, One of Our Aircraft Is ...”

“... of one of them. Among the cohort, thirsting after knowledge and high culture, were poets like David Samoilov and Boris Slutsky, future ‘enlightened bureaucrats’ like Anatoly Cherniaev, and a young Communist with a bright future, Mikhail Gorbachev, and his future wife, Raisa, both students at Moscow State University in the first half of the 1950s. Most ...”

“... speak in his own voice to camera: he was his own biggest asset. Here was a man – normal-looking, nice-looking, young – who had given up his $200,000 salary as an NSA contractor and his home in Hawaii (‘paradise’, Snowden called it) in order to let the world know what his government had been doing. As a consequence he faced an uncertain life in exile ...”