“... where they         have to go.’ ‘O glory of every poet, have a light, May my Zippo benefit me now, And all my stripping of your Sonnets. You see this hairy she-rat                   that stalks me like a pimp: Get her      off my back,                   for every vein and pulse ...”

“... be consciously aware. This skill or art requires a ‘third ear’ because it attends to what we may call a ‘third voice’, which is that of the poet neither representing a world nor figuring it but dwelling in it poetically. The ‘third voice’ is manifested not only in ‘what is explicitly stated and conventionally coded’, but above all in ...”

“... the identification of its owner provides no more than a hypothesis that has to be proved and may be able to be disproved. But the far more common source of hypotheses lies in a murky region far removed from admissible or even reliable evidence – the world of police informers and petty criminals, many of them inadequate or disturbed and all of them ...”

“... liberation – not less for love but expanding/Of love beyond desire’, continues: History may be servitude, History may be freedom. See, now they vanish The faces and places, with the self which, as it                              could, loved them, To become renewed, transfigured, in ...”

“... Blanche Patch, who spent her post-war leisure deciphering them. If she mentioned them to Shaw (she may not have), he appears to have shown no interest. Nor has anyone else, much, in the 36 years since Shaw’s death, except the predicted biographers. St John Ervine skimmed their scandalous cream in his ill-tempered centenary life in 1956. Other scholars have ...”

“... Jones’s attempts to placate both powerful women, each of whom had reason to feel injured by him, may be construed as either diplomacy or doubletalk. On 21 January 1942 he wrote to Klein that Anna Freud was ‘a tough and indigestible morsel’ who ‘has no pioneering originality’; on the same day he wrote to Freud that Klein ‘has neither a scientific ...”

“... impose, words associate, combine and bounce against each other in fresh new ways. Kelman may or may not be a scholar of Latin rhetoric, but he’s well up on all its tricks. Just look at this sentence: ‘Fucking bogging mud man a swamp, an actual swamp, it was fucking a joke’ (from ‘The Burn’). In standard ...”

“... engage in such retaliatory actions?’ Her answer, suggestive but tantalisingly brief, is that it may have been the effect of suicide – an act of violence, Freud suggested, ‘always aimed at more than one person’. But there’s more – the surfeit, excess and plethora that seem to be so much a part of the story. Art simplifies but life really piles it ...”

“... has not been easy. Our hunger for war bulletins is now absolute, and when we are satiated, there may simply be force-feeding. As this feast drags on, the Horn will be lucky if a few crumbs of coverage arc tossed its way. The Middle East has never held much solace out to Eritrea. Two of the most important protagonists in the Gulf war, Saudi Arabia and ...”

“... SS – were 40,000. That begs a question to which I know no answer, though Malraux’s own story may provide some clues. Busy with his writing and his family, Malraux was sceptical of resistance. In 1942, following the German occupation of the southern zone, he took up residence in a large châteauferme in Corrèze, which he only left in spring 1944, after ...”

“... be committing incest too: ‘when a man hath meddled with a woman, or a woman with a man, neither may be wedded to [the] other’s kin, into the fifth degree ... for if they do, it is incest.’ The most extreme view condemned all sex as incestuous, because all are one in the family of Adam. As a free-thinking Protestant, Bale was arguing against this ...”

“... even the FBI satisfied itself of this after years of investigation – he was nevertheless (if I may quote my own memories of him) much more than the generic New Deal ‘progressive’ to which Stowe tries to reduce him. Hammond’s record as a discoverer and developer of talent from 1933 to his death was unparalleled. It rested not only on astonishing ...”

“... that ‘it is never right to play ragtime fast.’ The music’s dignified, shimmering figures may have provoked discreet tapping of the feet, or been deemed suitable for novelty dances like the cakewalk, but it aimed at the sort of gentility implied by titles such as ‘Gladiolus Rag’, and ‘Heliotrope Bouquet’. Embodying almost the reverse of the ...”

“... resulted in the first battles of the American Revolution. Whatever the Catholics, Jews and Muslims may remember of a time when there were no Catholics, Jews and Muslims in Wayland, they have no excuse now – thanks to Professor Fischer – for not being able to find out all about Paul Revere and how the Revolution began. Some books promise more than they ...”

“... points about pseudo-revolutionary repression. He makes much, quite rightly, of the hundreds who may have died trying to float to Miami on inner tubes. He takes for granted, however, the exclusive jump-the-queue asylum granted to Cuban escapees by the US in 1966. Until this shadowy law was dropped on 19 August, and Cubans abruptly found themselves treated ...”