“... gentleman who told Bathurst about his reluctant withdrawal from the pleasures of life was Sir Peter de la Billière, commander-in-chief of British forces during the first Gulf War, whose deafening began when he was still in his twenties (he was born in 1934). He was downgraded on the basis of his poor hearing at the age of 36, but appealed and was ...”

“... policy.’ History will record whether Brzezinski made an intelligent decision in giving a green light to Pakistan’s development of nuclear weapons in return for assisting the anti-Soviet insurgency. Pakistan’s motives in Afghanistan were very different from those of the US. Zia was a devout Muslim and a passionate supporter of Islamist groups in ...”

“... party’s finances that has seen its treasurer, Colin Beattie, and its outgoing chief executive, Peter Murrell (who happens to be Sturgeon’s husband), arrested and then released without charge. Yet there is a deeper political problem facing Scottish nationalism. In absorbing so much of Labour’s urban vote, the SNP has finally tipped the scales of its own ...”

“... the cloth had to be ‘litted’ or dyed – the spinster Jane Browne was hired to dye some wool green, blue or white in 1630 – and if it was one of the loose-woven ‘old draperies’ such as kersey, it had to be fulled (or ‘tucked’) to draw the fibres closer together, and napped to remove loose hairs from the surface of the cloth, ready for ...”

“... is merely bored. This occurs with many of the poets in Michael Schmidt’s anthology, for though Peter Scupham, Jeremy Hooker, Jeffrey Wainwright, Dick Davies and John Ash are all highly talented and painstaking artists, they seem to be fashioning their poems for themselves and each other. As Auden and Eliot showed, ‘difficult’ poetry can still be ...”

“... and perhaps novel about Rupert is that he has no respect at all. Take the case of Lorraine and Peter Landau, a couple in Northwood, who took time from what one presumes was a busy schedule to write to Rupert, having seen him in The Vortex, to comment on ‘the audibility of my performance in rather pompous terms’. Rupert opened the letter while ‘deeply ...”

“... caps, or else the whole second storey was like a roof, covered in shingles. The shingles were dark green or maroon or brown. The porches came to within a few feet of the sidewalk and the spaces between the houses seemed narrow enough for people to reach out the side windows and shake hands. Children were playing on the sidewalk, but Queenie took no more notice ...”

“... Neal Ascherson, Ilya Budraitskis, James Butler, Andrew Cockburn, Meehan Crist, Sheila Fitzpatrick, Peter Geoghegan, Jeremy Harding, Owen Hatherley, Abby Innes, Mimi Jiang, Thomas Jones, Laleh Khalili, Jackson Lears, Donald MacKenzie, Thomas Meaney, James Meek, Pankaj Mishra, Azadeh Moaveni, Jan-Werner Müller, Vadim Nikitin, Jacqueline Rose, Jeremy ...”

“... a few lines on one side of it; Moore’s vast archive of unpublished poetry was drawn on by Peter Riley for two posthumous collections, Lacrimae Rerum (1988) and Longings of the Acrobats (1990), but for the most part sleeps undisturbed in the Cambridge University Library. Moore’s few, but fervent, admirers are hoping that a fresh Selected to be ...”

“... they were open to social contact. A red badge meant: ‘Nobody should try to interact with me.’ Green meant: ‘I want to interact but am having trouble initiating, so please initiate an interaction with me.’ As a result of the prominence given to the Autism Wars, it took a long time for the autism-rights message to move from the fringes to the ...”

“... bloodless abstraction – ‘All theory is grey, my friend,’ as Goethe observed, ‘but forever green is the tree of life.’ Carey sometimes takes this line: it lies behind his admiration for Ted Hughes, for instance, whose poetry exposes ‘the fragility and misplaced pride of the human intellect’. But, as Stefan Collini has observed, what really gets ...”

“... is a nice phrase, even if it’s half-inched from an interviewee in a previous book, Jonathon Green’s flawless oral history of 1960s counterculture, Days in the Life. (In fact Green also used it as a subheading. This feels a bit previous to me: to use someone else’s quote is OK, but their layout too?) The early Mods ...”

“... fictional device, a point of view. She appends a small anthology of the poems, well translated by Peter Norman, that she deems necessary for an understanding of her narrative. Anatoly Nayman, a poet and playwright, was, along with Joseph Brodsky and Dmitry Bobyshev, one of a group of young writers whom Akhmatova made her spiritual children. He met her in 1959 ...”

“... that as you grow older some sense of an accumulating “oeuvre” is unavoidable,’ he told Peter McDonald in an interview, ‘but the very word sounds so pompous – you know, those people who talk about “my work”.’ Still, for all Longley’s likeable unpretentiousness, an oeuvre, with the sustained imaginative integrity that implies, is ...”

“... returned to England from America and was living again in his rooms at 3 Bolton Street, just off Green Park. ‘Instead of superficial contacts with the British upper classes,’ James’s biographer Leon Edel reports, ‘James began to form friendships of a more significant kind – with members of his own class, the writers and artists of London.’ There ...”