“... resent is that most of Shelley’s poems – except for ‘Letter to Maria Gisborne’ and ‘Peter Bell the Third’, which might have been written by a good Augustan – were written by Julian rather than by Maddalo. Such readers have always wanted ‘heard melodies’ to sound for ‘those unheard’, and they deride as spiritual vanity any apparently ...”

“... that Europe acts only if the rights of multinationals and banks are at stake: Brussels gave the green light to negotiations over new IMF loans only after central bank independence had been assured. Concerns over the independence of the judiciary will be dealt with by the European Court, which usually takes for ever. Suspicion of Brussels has been encouraged ...”

“... magazine Oxford Poetry in 1930. In his excellent introduction to this definitive Complete Poetry, Peter Robinson characterises Spencer as an unconfident poet who, when his luck was in, wrote poems that were ‘profoundly uncertain’: ‘within his small oeuvre, poem after poem sounds true. That sound sense of reliable poetry was achieved under the shadow of ...”

“... outward glance that we are likewise her subjects. Their fluctuating satins, the swags of laurel-green curtain behind them and the late June evening clouds all rise and fall to an inner rhythm that is unmistakeably amorous. To view this painting is to get tossed up in that convulsion, but it’s also to recognise that its wellsprings do not belong to ...”

“... a rare instance of effective political improvisation on his part. Less astutely, Brown brought Peter Mandelson back into the cabinet, despite their volatile relationship and Mandelon’s history of personal scandals. As political correspondent for the New Statesman, Macintyre was one of the facilitators of this ‘imaginative move’, he tells us, a role ...”

“... a new term of art), publishing Terror and Liberalism just in time for the Iraq war. Peter Beinart, a former editor of the New Republic, followed in his wake this year with The Good Fight: Why Liberals – and Only Liberals – Can Win the War on Terror and Make America Great Again, where he sketches at some length the resemblance between the War ...”

“... said that.’ The next day: ‘Up to see TB in the flat. Another Austin Powers moment. Yellow/green underpants and that was it. I said what a prat he looked. He said I was just jealous – how many prime ministers have got a body like this?’ There is a flirtatious edge to this. Martin Amis, in a piece reporting on Blair’s last weeks in office, also ...”

“... was variation in colour. Chemical compounds containing strontium burn red; copper carbonate adds green; iron filings make showers of golden sparkles.China’s appetite for novelty also led to chains of multiple ignitions and wooden dragons spitting fire. The 16th-century scholar Feng Ying Ching wrote about a kind of bomb from which sprang ground rats and ...”

“... clothes mattered a great deal. A Roman law of 1561 stated, for example, that debtors must wear a green beret and Jewish men a yellow one; one of 1631 that gypsy women ‘must lay down their Gypsy dress, or rather destroy it so that it is no longer suitable for such use’. Sex workers were banned from wearing the fashionable lenzuolo, the long sheer veil ...”

“... pretty quickly – as Suite at the Majestic. That same translation became The Strange Case of Peter the Lett, then The Case of Peter the Lett. In 1963 it was newly translated as Maigret and the Enigmatic Lett. David Bellos’s recent translation is the first with the confidence to call the book in English what it is ...”

“... wherever he found them’ – Harry Palmer ‘came to epitomise the decline of deference’. (Peter Hitchens, in contrast, uses the framework of national identity in The Abolition of Britain, published in 1999, to issue a diatribe against the ‘social revolution’ – the disappearance of restraint, family values and ‘much-mended leather ...”

“... and crystals, beard care and curated playlists. As with the Beatles album sleeves designed by Peter Blake and Richard Hamilton, this was where art and pop first locked eyes, before deciding to move in together.Ahalf-century​ on from the band’s messy divorce, you don’t have to go searching for Beatles bumpf: it’s everywhere. They’re as much a ...”

“... was Leaving the 20th Century: The Incomplete Work of the Situationist International, a slim green volume published in 1974, crammed with photographs, illustrations and comic strips, compiled and annotated by Christopher Gray. Years later I learned that Gray had rubbed shoulders with McLaren in a Notting Hill group called King Mob, a unofficial affiliate ...”

“... For Wearing, contemporary drama (the ‘journalism of the imagination’) was the loser. Even Peter Flannery’s triumphant mid-1990s nine-parter Our Friends in the North was shown despite rather than because of the prevailing BBC ethos. Michael Jackson, then head of BBC2, described the serial as ‘without doubt the contemporary drama event of the ...”

“... his life to maim//Himself somehow for the job,’ he wrote in a posthumous address to the painter Peter Lanyon. Apart from a brief and incongruous spell as an advertising copywriter and the occasional stint on fishing boats, he refused to succumb to the distraction of a day job; he didn’t write reviews or journalism; and as his books of verse were very far ...”