“... befriending and then covering up on behalf of the Democratic politician and presidential hopeful John Edwards takes the genre of enabler’s revenge to a whole new level. ‘Covering up’ doesn’t really do justice to Young’s role, which by the end included going on the run with Edwards’s mistress Rielle Hunter and their love-child (with Young’s own ...”

“... that English literature had already been taking up the swelling theme of empire – a new book by John McVeagh has much to say about this. ‘How can one write the history of the English-speaking peoples and their empires?’ – a large question on which Calder must have long deliberated before striking out his path. There has been discussion lately as to ...”

“... and a fragile, insecure State combined to produce a sort of dark ages. It was as though Ireland north and south vied with each other over who could produce the most sectarian state. Censorship, mass emigration, economic stagnation. For several chapters this book deals not with the Church but with the State, because the Church was the State. It has always ...”

“... lately engaged in the destruction of the Stalingrad cauldron against the German forces further north. As a result, the drive on Rostov failed, though only just, and Manstein, the greatest of the German commanders, was able to outmanoeuvre and defeat the Soviet offensive. Now came one of the crucial decisions of the war. In February 1943 Manstein, who had ...”

“... The​ village of Capel Celyn was drowned in 1965 when the valley of Tryweryn, in north-west Wales, was flooded to create a reservoir to serve the (English) city of Liverpool. No Welsh MP supported the bill that enabled the reservoir to be built. Seventy people had to leave their homes. The words ‘Cofiwch Dryweryn’ (‘Remember Tryweryn’), written on the wall of a ruined cottage near Aberystwyth, subsequently became a slogan for Welsh nationalism, and the flooding of the valley precipitated the election of the nationalist Plaid Cymru’s first MP, Gwynfor Evans, in 1966 ...”

“... and with it the promise of widespread prosperity. This dogma held sway even at the University of North Carolina, a centre of Southern liberalism, where Woodward earned his doctorate. In 1935, he wrote to a friend that he had ‘not gleaned a single scholarly idea from any professor’. Things changed later that year, however, with the arrival of Howard ...”

“... the meaning of nakedness, anticipated by a decade or so the Ginsberg party trick that shocked John Lennon and George Harrison at the dawn of Swinging London. When I interviewed one of the Six Gallery poets, Michael McClure, in 2011, he recalled earlier episodes of Dionysian frenzy with Gerd Stern and a thrash of ‘belly dancers and bongo drums’. Nights ...”

“... who was then 52 and lived in Collioure on the French part of the Mediterranean coast, just north of the border with Catalonia. He had published three gloomily introspective novels for adults, one of which had been praised by Delmore Schwartz, and he was an elegant, speedy translator, most recently of Simone de Beauvoir. Further information was in short ...”

“... to practise my newly acquired skill. My parents were both readers and Dad took the periodical John Bull, the books they generally favoured literature of escape, tales of ordinary folk like themselves who had thrown it all up for a life of mild adventure, a smallholding on the Wolds, say, or an island sanctuary, with both of them fans of the naturalist ...”

“... pleasant opportunity to tell people twice their age what to do. At the time when the undergraduate John Henry Newman was delighting in the inexhaustible metaphorical riches of Aeschylus at Oxford, the students of Maynooth were being fed a philistine diet of papist apologetics and garbled chunks of scholasticism. It was well nigh impossible, given this dismal ...”

“... The dust jacket of the final volume of Bevis Hillier’s epic life of John Betjeman shows the poet laureate seized by giggles. In this lengthy coda to Hillier’s authorised biography Betjeman appears in many lights, but he’s rarely carefree. ‘Nothing frightens me more than the thought of dying,’ he told a friend in 1958 ...”

“... quite able to make up his mind.The dependence​ of African states on countries in the global north is a recurring theme in Bulawayo’s writing. The publication of We Need New Names led to a debate about the state of publishing in Africa; the Nigerian novelist Helon Habila criticised its ‘Caine-prize aesthetic’ and questioned whether such novels did ...”

“... children had been thrown, was ‘sacred ground’. Dyer, like Neill and the equally psychopathic John Nicholson, was notable for his piety. Wagner might also have reached further back, to Rollo Gillespie’s execution of hundreds of unarmed prisoners in a fives court after the mutiny at Vellore in 1806, which recalls Dyer’s brutal floggings on the tennis ...”

“... uncandid class-consciousness of our domestic criticism. On our map, there are no compass-points. North, for instance, does not mean good. *** We say to France: AUT TACE AUT LOQUERE MELIORA SILENTIO – either shut up or say something worth saying. A Poem against Barn Owls Some people think that barn owls Are an endangered species. But they are found all ...”

“... Pietro Germi, Anatole Litvak, Jean Painlevé, Gillo Pontecorvo, Nicholas Roeg, George Rouquier, John Schlesinger, Henri Storck, John Sturges and Arne Sucksdorff. And what are we to make of those who are mentioned in the text, but not favoured with individual entries? Pioneers like the Lumière brothers; veterans like ...”