“... almost wherever she went, for Graves these conflicts were evidence of her ineffable, otherworldly powers, ‘tourbillions in Time made’, as he once put it, ‘By the strong pulling of her bladed mind/Through that ever-reluctant element’. Riding’s own extraordinary poetry added to the mystique of her invulnerability; its severe abstract propositions ...”

“... his life to his work, as happens in Lowell or Berryman. Essentially Schwartz was, like Dylan Thomas, a dazzling phrasemaker. His first lines were usually his best, and these often became the poems’ titles: ‘Dogs are Shakespearean, Children are strangers’, ‘In the Naked Bed, in Plato’s Cave’, ‘The Beautiful American Word, Sure’. Phrases ...”

“... or sociologists. One giddying factor, though, was our dissatisfaction with the leading Communist powers – since both China and the Soviet Union seemed to be giving too little assistance to Vietnam, the land of burning children: when the liberalised government of Czechoslovakia was suppressed by Soviet troops, many left-wingers in Western Europe felt as if ...”

“... seems to have been happiest when being a chum to her admirers. After Bland’s death she married Thomas Tucker, Captain of the Woolwich ferry, who, Mrs Briggs explains, ‘had the vowels of a London waterman, however genuine his feelings’. The Tuckers adopted nautical jargon, brewed coffee in the Captain’s galley, and danced hornpipes. Nesbit, who said ...”

“... at war with the West though not with Russia. Alongside Germany she was one of the occupying powers against which Tito’s Partisans, with British support, were fighting in Yugoslavia. Now, however, self-interest was bringing the country under the increasing influence of an advancing Russia, even while the Comintern, based in Moscow and led by the ...”

“... to turn on the strange goings-on of 1548, which involved Catherine Parr and her fourth husband Thomas Seymour, brother of the Protector Somerset, a marriage which, thanks to Elizabeth’s presence in the household, became something of a ménage à trois: risky romps in Elizabeth’s bedchamber, the curious episode in the garden when Seymour cut her dress ...”

“... different piece on the piano in case his memory attracted attention. Even more impressive were his powers of improvisation. Though he thought extemporising in public an ‘absurdity’, it was his stock-in-trade. In private, on one of his many visits to London, he wowed a nine-year-old pianist with 20 spontaneous variations on ‘Bluebells of ...”

“... in London, no goods were to be sold after Vespers (around 6 p.m.), marked by the bell of St Thomas the Martyr of Acon; Compline, struck on the bells of St Martin’s Le Grand, marked the closure of the taverns and the city curfew.Devotional attention to time encouraged the development of devices to measure it. The most ubiquitous instrument was the ...”

“... evidence​ at street level from Thanet is that while a sense of being taken for a ride by remote powers – Brussels, Westminster, Holyrood, Pfizer – draws people to Ukip, it isn’t the key attraction. Asked the morning after the Scottish independence referendum whether ‘the English question’ – should there be an England-only legislature to match ...”

“... it was as though my schoolfellows and I had stumbled into the pages of ‘The Treasure of Abbot Thomas’, ‘Canon Alberic’s Scrapbook’ or another of the horrid inventions in Ghost Stories of an Antiquary. Led past stacks of disintegrating coffins, from which skulls and yellowing bones spilled across the dusty floor, we were introduced to the crypt’s ...”

“... presence’; and he wonders aloud whether for such a man a love-life was possible. Raymond’s powers of withdrawal, his lack of close friends, his absence of hilarity or gregariousness ... must have made him a terribly matter-of-fact father and husband; he couldn’t possibly have been a lover. His massive pipe was scarcely [sic] out for a start – the ...”

“... the abstract with the concrete’, yet at the same time he insists that ‘the mind has laws, powers and principles of its own, and is not a mere dependent on matter.’ Hazlitt admired Lamb because his friend’s ‘love of the actual does not proceed from a want of taste for the ideal.’ ‘Taste’ in this context is both an accomplishment and an ...”

“... and opportunities for friendship with educated men and women, and had won the respect of Thomas Hardy and George Meredith. For six years – his longest stay in one place – he had occupied a respectable flat on the edge of Regent’s Park. As if compelled for a second time to kick away his chances of success and suitable companionship, Gissing ...”

“... he told me that thanks to the Nigerian bomber he had been visited by the New York Times columnist Thomas Friedman. Friedman, having asked his questions, went back to the US and told his readers that the city ‘was not Kabul … yet’, but that AQAP was a ‘virus’ that needed urgent attention before the spread of the disease became uncontrollable. He ...”

“... Conventional criticism allows only subsidiary places to the strenuous translation of Psalms by Sir Thomas Wyatt or Sir Philip Sidney (the ‘Sidneian Psalms’ acclaimed by a poem of Donne) or Milton. Yet Donne himself, who worried whether poetry was equal to the expression of divine truth unless a divine spirit directed it, maintained that the ‘tropes and ...”