“... world and its ‘global concepts’ were mistily obscured, the inside world, as in a sunshower, took on a corresponding, and slightly unreal, brightness. To this super-typicality, the voice in Reid’s first book brings the cajoling, heightening tones of a ringmaster. ‘Canapés and circuses, of course!’ one poem announces, as if by way of explaining its ...”

“... in the book, this couldn’t have actually happened, at least not at the moment of writing: it took place in hospital ten years later, at the author’s painful and premature deathbed. It also takes place by the Kremlin, which the drunken hero, tottering on his way from one Moscow railway station to another, has never troubled himself to visit. Worse ...”

“... Walls of Troy, since he had the money and the willpower to blast a trench through any mound that took his fancy. Calvert, to him, would have been an amiable, if rather studious, doormat who would not mind being written out of the cast any more than Yannakis the foreman, if the plot demanded it. A token tribute in the final report should settle things easily ...”

“... Quite plausibly, he simply wanted to see what his fellow player looked like, IRL and OOC. Ghaffari took his look and went his way. Even so, he was arrested by a waiting posse of officers and agents. Two condoms were found in his car (not unusual for a prudent 22-year-old bachelor in LA). It was enough. On 23 April, JAMINinLA, a.k.a. Aidin Ghaffari, was found ...”

“... by me upon the waters’ – to lead the elect by degrees into the mystery of things. Eliot took up the same theme in his 1937 Edinburgh University lectures on ‘Shakespeare as Poet and Dramatist’. There he described the characters in the final plays as ‘the work of a writer who has finally seen through the dramatic action of men into a spiritual ...”

“... of discretion’), perhaps out of kindness to his mother, Feltrinelli’s third wife, Inge, who took over the business and continues to run it (she is described as ‘a blend of Audrey Hepburn and Leslie Caron’). Inge’s suffering when Feltrinelli went underground is vividly recounted, however. Sibilla, the young fourth wife who lived in a ménage à ...”

“... Evidently, things have not greatly changed in the last two hundred years. No existing country, John Dunn suggests, manages ‘to combine prudent regard for the economic limits to modern politics with delicate and effective concern for the sorts of human beings whom its economic momentum fashions’. Professor Dunn, who contributes the introduction and both ...”

“... which won the battle of Lepanto – still to be seen on the great pale blue banner for Don John of Austria’s flagship, now in Toledo – could be regarded as a practical way of encouraging solidarity, and perhaps it took no longer to complete than it took for the alliance to ...”

“... out of Black-Scholes (as it is now universally known) and the worldwide derivatives business took off like a rocket. In an ideal world, one populated by vegetarians and Esperanto speakers, derivatives would be used for one thing only: reducing levels of risk. Because they are bought ‘on margin’ – i.e. not for the full cost of the underlying ...”

“... silence was eloquent … It was likely that during the two years in Steep the ‘shambly’ Bacon took stock, recasting himself as the powerful figure the world has come to know.On the other hand, it’s just as likely that nothing at all happened. Bacon was not actually alone. He was accompanied, as always, by his old nanny, Jessie Lightfoot. His lover Eric ...”

“... wedding anniversary. Joan Didion’s daughter, Quintana Roo, was married at the Cathedral of St John the Divine on Amsterdam Avenue in New York in 2003. Dates are important. In a writer as fastidious as Didion they carry a lot of weight. Detail matters too, sometimes more than the main thing, or instead of it: Seven years ago today we ...”

“... The engraved frontispiece​ to the 1635 second edition of John Donne’s Poems features a portrait of the artist as an exceedingly young man. Eighteen years old, in loose curls, padded Italian doublet, a single cross-shaped earring and the optimistic hint of a moustache, Donne clutches an oversized sword by the hilt and gazes sidelong at the viewer from beneath provocatively arched brows, a study in adolescent bravado ...”

“... to study if they didn’t want to. There were no marks or prizes, and no punishments were imposed. John Betjeman described it as ‘a co-educational school to which modern authors and intellectuals send their sons’. Freud had no interest in academic subjects. Instead, he was fascinated by horses, and remained fascinated all of his life. One of his school ...”

“... postwar vitality. The Whitechapel Art Gallery became a major venue after Bryan Robertson took over there, and the British Council, founded in 1934, also held important exhibitions, though it operated mostly abroad, becoming, as Garlake observes, an unacknowledged arm of the Foreign Office. Garlake quotes a letter, first brought to light in Frances ...”

“... The nice thing about John Buchan is that he was on the side of books. He thought, it is true, that he ought to have been a Guardian, shaping the Empire, or dominating Cabinets, or, at worst, ‘a power behind the throne’. However, after his spell in Milner’s ‘Kindergarten’, the nation didn’t seem to want him in the Guardian line, so he did the next best thing and became an entertainer ...”