“... details about the national struggle against rule from London. But the fact that the majority of white troops in British India were for a long time Irish, as were a fair number of the Empire’s administrators, adventurers and traders, is usually – and wrongly – left out of the story. The Scottish response to lost Empire, too, is often a calculated ...”

“... a conservative aesthetic, but in their later poems, they caught up with the American Modernists (William Carlos Williams describing the peeling cityscape outside his window): by the time she wrote ‘Requiem’ and he wrote ‘Lines on an Unknown Soldier’, both formally innovative and both concerned with recording the voices of the lost, they had been ...”

“... only to fellow writers such as Wyndham Lewis, E.E. Cummings, Ford Madox Ford, Louis Zukofsky and William Carlos Williams, but also to various editors and patrons: to the somewhat mysterious Margaret Cravens, a Paris-based piano student from Madison, Indiana, who in 1910 bestowed on Pound an annual stipend so he could concentrate on his poetry, only to commit ...”

“... class distinctions into those of race. In India he sees the social aloofness of the ruling white minority as being reinforced during the 19th century by a growing taboo against sexual intercourse across the colour line. Half a century ago, Percival Spear, in his delightful book The Nabobs, traced the transformation from the 18th-century ménage of the ...”

“... might like to be praised about. He understood writers’ egos, and major hacks visiting the White House would be greeted by JFK as if they were just the adviser the country needed. According to Arthur Schlesinger, Kennedy considered making Walter Lippmann his ambassador to Paris, but Schlesinger told the president he was more useful in the papers. When ...”

“... and shore up its authority in its own sphere of influence, while at home they would allow the White House to outflank the antiwar left. As Kissinger put it, ‘refusing to negotiate with the Kremlin would spread the virulence of the anti-Vietnam protest movement into every aspect of American foreign policy, and deeply, perhaps, into our ...”

“... plagiarist (his speeches stole from Neil Kinnock and JFK). Age took the edge off him. Reaching the White House four years ago, he accomplished at 78 what he couldn’t manage at 45 or 65. Perhaps he’s been better at the job as a mellow old man than he would have been as a middle-aged hothead – though that is little comfort to the rest of the ...”

“... workers. These groups were most successful when they were well-organised, well-connected and white: all characteristics of the tobacco growers who benefited most from New Deal agricultural policy.The Agricultural Adjustment Administration gave farmers government subsidies to keep acreage fallow, protecting farm prices by creating scarcity. This policy ...”

“... in his own evidence. The idea of the Civil War as a cultural conflict is not new: it goes back to William Chillingworth, preaching before the King in 1643, and saying all the scribes and pharisees were on one side, and all the publicans and sinners on the other. What is new here is the meticulous investigation, town by town and village by village, of the ...”

“... ought there to be a glossary, ‘ee by gum’ or ‘eeh baah gum’? (The issues are raised by William Neill when he prints two versions of the same poem on facing pages, both in dialect but one a good deal more dialectal than the other.) Since poets are not etymologists they may play fast and loose, as MacDiarmid did when assembling some of his lyrics ...”

“... relations to her friendship with Graham Greene and her love affair with Naples. In 1961, William Maxwell accepted the first story she submitted to the New Yorker, the fragrant, Elizabeth Bishop-like ‘Woollahra Road’. She published two collections: Cliffs of Fall (1963) and People in Glass Houses (1967). The latter – a series of linked stories ...”

“... the effect of her collection of queer hats and sticks, her face ‘pale as sand’, pale as her white stockings, and also, I think, of her apparent obsession with death. She was interested in death, and particularly in its willingness to oblige, she had survived a suicide attempt in 1953, she was touched by the silence of the ‘countless, countless ...”

“... understand/why guacamole is/extra/it is because/you/were never/enough – rupi kaur.’ William Carlos Williams is up there with her as a parodied subject, racking up thousands of posthumous likes for internet rewritings of ‘This Is Just to Say’ – the plums and icebox poem which can handily be tweaked in the Notes app on an iPhone. ‘I have ...”

“... Sloane Ranger stratum as well. The Figaro carries a piece about jeunes filles. At a ball they wear white tulle from couture houses to dance with uniformed boys from the Polytechnique. Bridge lessons, single-string pearls, Maman’s cocktail parties, engraved invitations, an engagement ring by 20 at all costs. The difference now, says the writer, is that the ...”

“... a room in Beirut and engaged Matisse as decorator. The sunlit balcony looked onto a blue sea. The white wooden table beside my transatlantique held a sliced melon. Hibiscus bloomed nearby. Some other fragrance that I could not and cannot name is still available to my senses, as arc the other wholly abstract elements of this notional construct, invulnerable to ...”