“... dominates the first chapter of The Arch-Poet much as Purgatory gives focus to its ending. Again we are presented with an Old Man and a young. They meet beneath another bare tree, where the water of immortality sometimes bubbles up. The Old Man has been waiting to drink for more than half a century, but is always distracted from the prize by a woman of the ...”

“... Homosexuality:​ do we really have to talk about it? Earl Winterton, aged 71, introducing a debate in the House of Lords in 1954, apologised for bringing forward ‘this nauseating subject’. In his youth it was never mentioned in ‘decent mixed society’; in male society it was ‘contemptuously described by a good old English cognomen’ which he refused to utter in the House ...”

“... in America. This neighbourhood, across the Hudson from uptown Manhattan, about a mile south of the George Washington Bridge on the Jersey side, has lost more than a little of its character and charm over the years with the proliferation of McMansions – what my father used to call ‘Greco-Roman fortresses’ or ‘mausolea’ – which take up entire ...”

“... of the non-indictment of Brown’s killer, a white police officer called Darren Wilson. ‘We are captured, brother, surrounded by the majoritarian bandits of America,’ he writes in a typically despairing passage: The terrible truth is that we cannot will ourselves to an escape on our own … You have been cast ...”

“... it came to working with other race and ideological groups.’ Only Mandela’s nephews, Kaiser and George Matanzima, were as close to Mandela as Tambo and Sisulu: to Mandela’s great pain, they were later to betray the cause by leading the Transkei Bantustan to its spurious independence. It was to Kaiser Matanzima that poor Eveline turned for help a few years ...”

“... a soprano soloist into the third and fourth movements to sing settings of two poems by Stefan George. The first, ‘Litanei’, begins ‘Tief ist die Trauer die mich umdüstert’ (‘Deep is the sadness that envelops me’) and ends with the plea, ‘Töte das sehnen, schliesse die Wunde’ (‘Kill the longing, close the wound!’); the ...”

“... After two hours​ on the tarmac at LaGuardia Airport, the flight was cancelled and we were deplaned. I had been seated next to a former congresswoman who lost to another incumbent in 2022 as a result of redistricting, after decades in the House of Representatives. Like me, she was on her way to Chicago to attend the Democratic National Convention ...”

“... novelists, such as Ian Maclaren and J.M. Barrie, nor the small-town gothic that reacted to it, in George Douglas Brown’s House with the Green Shutters (1901) or John MacDougall Hay’s Gillespie (1914). Kinraddie, ‘the new minister’ proclaims at the end of the prelude to Sunset Song, ‘was the Scots countryside itself, fathered between a kailyard and a ...”

“... becoming a stalwart of light entertainment broadcasting in the 1950s. He once introduced a talk by George Bernard Shaw. ‘Young man,’ Shaw said, pointing to the microphone, ‘this is a devilish contraption. You can’t deceive it – so don’t try.’ Gamlin later said he remembered all his life the genial advice Shaw had given him. He didn’t want to ...”

“... to her daily when she was in her eighties. By turns guilty and grumbling (‘a perpetual burning bush of fury in my chest’), Larkin’s attitude towards her doesn’t seem particularly unusual, though his dutifulness does. Even so, Woolworth’s would hardly have been her cup of tea. The other long-standing lady in Larkin’s life (and who stood for a good ...”

“... legtimates attempts to pierce that secrecy. Pincher has been going round and round this mulberry bush for forty years now, with considerable commercial success. Pincher’s latest offering is at least as awful as the rest. As a literary construction it is a mess, rambling endlessly and repetitively around the same warmed-over material which he has already ...”

“... eyes lived as brown nightingales’. Her hair was a ‘lignous’ coiled black, like a ‘combed bush’. De Acosta boasted that she could steal any woman from any man. Garbo, who allowed herself to be briefly seduced then struggled for twenty years to extricate herself from de Acosta’s succubus clutches, called her ‘Miss Black and White’; a cynical ...”

“... a majority, was there any question even of self-government. The outlook at Whitehall remained: we hold what we have. If public justification was needed, Eden would provide one that was crude enough: ‘No Cyprus, no certain facilities to protect our supply of oil. No oil, unemployment and hunger in Britain. It is as ...”

“... The world​ needs Seymour Hersh. Without his indefatigable reporting, we would know even less than we do about the crimes committed by the US national security state over the last fifty years. While most of his peers in the press have been faithfully transcribing what are effectively official lies, Hersh has repeatedly challenged them, revealing scandalous government conduct that would otherwise have been kept secret: the My Lai massacre in Vietnam, the domestic surveillance programme run by the intelligence agencies in the 1960s and 1970s, the torturing of prisoners at Abu Ghraib ...”

“... was run by Fisk mean girls. She called them ‘dicty’. The NACW’s motto was ‘lifting as we climb’. Larsen wasn’t interested in slogans like that, or in ‘good Negroes’. Her books weren’t ‘of the propaganda type,’ she told Alfred Knopf, who published both of them. She wrote about the class she married into, and her novels struggle with ...”