“... 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 ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... food if we drop tariffs on agricultural imports from Africa, Australasia and the Americas, as Michael Gove wants to do, and it gets even better. Just not for farmers. The spectre haunting the British farmyard is that the EU debate will turn public attention to what’s happening down on the farm, whatever the referendum result. There is, after ...”

“... In July​  1999, the writer Joe Wood vanished while attending a conference of journalists of colour in Seattle. He was 34, a brilliant essayist, ferocious in his critiques of racism – not least as he experienced it in the ‘liberal’ publishing world. The last time we met, a week before his trip to Seattle, he was wearing a Malcolm X cap and carrying a well-worn copy of William Gaddis’s novel The Recognitions ...”

“... smile to herself and sit back again.’ When George’s daughter Anne was born in 1919 and son Michael in 1921, the sisters became enthusiastic babysitters and general chroniclers of their brother’s household. ‘I think George enjoys the thrill she gets when she gives her name in shops,’ Lolly wrote. ‘Mrs W.B. Yeats.’ Lily thought her ...”

“... their civility the better to use law and force against the Irish, from Spenser’s long-haired wood kerns through the Fenians to the Hunger Strikers. ‘Heroic Styles’ (1984) proposes, equally provocatively, that Yeats and Joyce contributed to the logjam of the North. Both essays are vigilant, authoritative and tendentious, with Deane jesting about the ...”

“... are often in the middle of the day and at lunchtime today it’s The Stars Look Down (1939) with Michael Redgrave, which I would have seen in 1940 in one of Armley’s half a dozen picture houses. Like How Green Was My Valley (1941) and Emlyn Williams’s The Corn Is Green (1945), it’s the story of a working-class boy bettering himself through education ...”

“... At the end of June 1915, T.S. Eliot and Vivienne Haigh-Wood, both 27 years old, were married in a London register office. They had been introduced less than three months earlier by mutual friends in Oxford, where Eliot had been spending the year reading in the Bodleian and working on his Harvard doctoral dissertation in philosophy ...”