“... not the son of his mother’s husband, Joseph. The accusation is repeated in the Chester and York plays, while in the Towneley plays the preferred word is ‘mare’ (as in ‘night-mare’, being ridden by a succubus). The famous Second Shepherds’ Play of the Towneley cycle has the sheep-stealer Mak’s wife, Gill, pretend that the lamb they have ...”

“... the Ormonde Hotel during the first nights of the Blitz until he secured a berth on a boat to New York. Read’s ‘nest of gentle artists’ had scattered to the winds. If the Isokon​ stands for modernism’s prewar moment in Britain, then a flat-roofed glass house in the Scottish Borders gives us its postwar legacy. High Sunderland was commissioned in ...”

“... US embassy in London about a minor German plot to steal secrets from an American colonel in New York. After the culprit was arrested, another MI5 officer, Guy Liddell, travelled to the US to discuss the case with American officials and to push for more co-operation between British security services and the FBI. But as Kerbaj’s account shows, he didn’t ...”

“... were ‘infested with tigers’. But – like the late antique holy men studied by the historian Peter Brown – these gurus remained involved with the societies they had fled. In the years before his trip to Chicago, Datta went far beyond Bengal, visiting Hinduism’s holiest places. Like the Buddhist lama in Kipling’s Kim, whose ‘search’ for a holy ...”

“... nothing to do with misfortune. It was the result of systematic fraud, conducted by what the New York District Attorney called ‘a corrupt and criminal organisation’ over a period of nearly twenty years. The mastermind behind the fraud was Agha Hassan Abedi. Abedi had what is known inside banks as charisma and outside banks as a nice line in drivel. He ...”

“... It has all become too ugly, too personal. Weather can no longer be mentioned in polite society. As Peter Redgrove points out in his provocative study, The Black Goddess and the Sixth Sense, we are ‘so violently affected by weather change ... that it can easily become a clinical problem’. Redgrove confesses himself a ‘Jekyll and Hyde to the weather’. He ...”

“... by singers and conductors to the stodgy naturalistic productions put on by companies like New York’s Metropolitan or the revisionist stagings originally mounted by Wieland Wagner, the composer’s grandson, during the post-war years at Bayreuth and followed variously there and elsewhere by Patrice Chéreau, Götz Friedrich, Ruth Berghaus, Harry ...”

“... a slight resentment towards translations, and in his clever ‘Poem Waiting to be Translated’, Peter Porter asks: Why not remember the heroes of hard situations, those who answered inquisitors in fresh parables, whose lyrical rejoinders are assembled here in memorial Penguins? Porter is glancing at the work of Zbigniew Herbert and Tadeusz Rozewicz, and ...”

“... the pace of Pinget translations seems to have been hotted up by an enterprising small press in New York, Red Dust, who have not only reinstated the missing Passacaglia out proceeded to fill most remaining gaps with their stylish and relatively cheap publications. That Voice (Pinget’s penultimate novel, dating from 1975) appears in the company of Between ...”

“... Several months.’ ‘Wullah! What would one do in Damascus for months? What is wrong with New York?’ (A foreigner is always an American here.) ‘I’m English,’ I said. He mumbled a welcome. Then, why was I not going on to Lebanon? In Damascus I could see the Great Mosque and the big bazaar in an afternoon. Then I could go to Beirut. He had heard ...”

“... he told me, I just believed him, because he believed in himself to the fullest,’ Zelma told Peter Guralnick. In the summer of 1962, a month before his 21st birthday, Redding got his big break. On 14 August or thereabouts (accounts vary), he drove Jenkins to Memphis to record at Stax and persuaded the studio’s founder, Jim Stewart, to let him sing a ...”

“... nominee as ambassador to the Vatican, can’t be happy. These last two, according to the New York Times, went to a ball in Rome ahead of the conclave with various right-wing European politicians. Most of those present supported a Hungarian cardinal called Peter Erdo. ‘He’s what we need right now,’ Tim ...”

“... colleagues his liaison with the wife of his opposite number in journalism and espionage, the New York Times’s man in Beirut, Sam Pope Brewer. Set back from the shore behind the Saint Georges loomed a cluster of its less exalted competitors, Le Vendôme, the Palm Beach, the Excelsior and the garish Phoenicia Intercontinental, where aquarium-style windows ...”

“... his bleeding face, and if we are as severe as these editors, and if we want to keep that moment (Peter Brook, for example, didn’t), we have really to accept a version of the play that lacks over a hundred lines found only in the Folio. The General Introduction ably defends these editorial principles, and along the way gives a very lucid and engaging ...”

“... period which coincides closely with his rereading and rewriting of his literary corpus for the New York Edition. Armstrong’s hypothesis, supported by analysis of James’s descriptions of the process of revision in letters and prefaces, is that the chewing-over and purification of bodily process is equivalent to that of the process of revision. The ...”