“... him on the value of good writing. ‘Sometimes even,’ she begins, adopting the piousness of Michael Parkinson facing Auden, ‘you were disgusted with literature; you used to say, Literature is shit. What exactly did you mean? And from time to time, more recently, you have said to me: after all, it’s stupid to work at expressing oneself; you seemed to ...”

“... with the taste and smoke of sea-coles’. Then and in the 17th century, industry was blamed; wood-smoke from lime-burning and fumes from coal (‘sea-coal’) burned in breweries, bakeries and glass foundries. John Evelyn’s Fumifugium, or, the Inconvenience of the Aer and Smoak of London Dissipated (1661) dismissed the idea that domestic hearths had ...”

“... the nominal jurisdiction of the Palestinian Authority. Young men distributed dry sticks of olive wood to dip into a barrel of fire. In Arabic and English, white banners proclaimed ‘Jerusalem is also holy for Palestinians’ and ‘History repeats itself: yesterday Nero, today Sharon.’ Torches alight and banners aloft, the marchers sang the anthem of the ...”

“... a mother (Lena) who has been to America, who might have had a different life there, and a father (Michael) who periodically folds himself into the arms of the monks to dry out. There is the convent where Edna was educated, and the eyebrows of the nun she loved passionately there. There is also the changeable shape of her first husband, whom she met while ...”

“... morning hours. When staying for several days each week with the Mirrlees family at Shamley Wood in Surrey during the Second World War, Eliot negotiated an arrangement that met his needs. Geoffrey Faber, who knew his colleague better than most, immediately grasped the benefit Eliot would derive from his move out of London: ‘An excellent life for him ...”

“... through anxiety and depression. Most mornings, the car that took him from his home in St John’s Wood to the Observer offices near Fleet Street would divert to Sigmund Freud’s old house in Maresfield Gardens, Hampstead, where Freud’s daughter Anna still saw patients. There, Astor would spend a daily analytic hour on the couch attempting to understand his ...”

“... over which time passes-a false light. In his introduction to the New Collected Works, Michael Davidson calls Discrete Series a ‘rather modest book’, but this is true only of its size. Andrew Crozier is surely right to say, in Modern American Poetry (1984), that it is ‘almost too deliberately calculated, with an unconcealed but obscure ...”

“... about tax accountants. One, and the most obvious, is a novel about Irish dancers on tour with a Michael Flatley figure whose influence grows more sinister over time. Pounds of verbal oil will be poured into his perm; his bulge will almost rupture his trousers. His backstory – but surely you can picture it. One dancer is addicted to weed, another feels ...”

“... the book gives prominence to Home Rule as an issue and to SNP successes as a problem for Labour. Michael Keating takes on the difficult job of explaining Labour’s advance in Scotland and Tory decline in the period 1951-64. He attributes this to the ‘resilience of class divisions’: Scottish Labour MPs, ‘compared to their English counterparts’, were ...”

“... is a single-stringed instrument held between the knees and played with a bow. The body is made of wood with a skin membrane (like a drum), and the string from sixty entwined horsehairs. The neck often finishes in a scroll carved in the form of a horse’s head. The bow is horsehair too. The instrument has a narrow range, tuned to the same pitch as the ...”

“... in 1951 included Henry Reed, Lawrence Durrell. Christopher Fry, C. Day Lewis, Lennox Berkeley, Michael Tippett, William Walton, Laurie Lee and Stevie Smith. Until the early Fifties the BBC appeared to get a good return from its policy of patronising highbrow talent. From the inauguration of the Italia Prize in 1949, until 1955, of 15 entries chosen as the ...”

“... using various technologies – Haeckel’s drawings were given to others to be turned into wood-block and copper engravings and lithographs. They were accompanied by different textual glosses but they were all enlisted in the same basic scientific and philosophical cause. Hopwood’s book is a richly illustrated and staggeringly detailed story of how ...”

“... literary and artistic worlds: his maternal grandfather was Ford Madox Brown, his uncle William Michael Rossetti. The only possible career for the children of these classes was that of a genius. Ford’s Rossetti cousins had written Greek dramas at the ages of five, nine and fourteen respectively. It became his duty always to aspire to consequence. ‘To me ...”

“... unit. Some of the stories obtained this way were trivial, though intrusive: George Michael wept in his jail cell, for example, or a male British Airways worker secretly wore high heels. Others were more serious: security lapses at Heathrow, or equipment shortages in Afghanistan. Almost anything could be obtained if the offer was big enough: in ...”

“... track-making. Thus one would originally ‘write’ by drawing a point across a surface of wood, stone or earth: by furrowing a track. In these ways, walkers can be thought of as writers, laying a marked trail on the ground in the form of paths, just as writers can be thought of as walkers, laying a marked trail on the page in the form of print.One ...”