“... where I might try again. Mr Baker’s anthology was on the best-seller list by the summer, when I took it down to Dorset and found the place where it would really come to life. Driving up from West Lulworth, I left behind the yellow fields of EEC oil seed rape and travelled up onto the rougher, more English ground of Povington Hill. The heath still resembles ...”

“... As John Berryman​ tells it, in a Paris Review interview conducted in 1970, he was walking to a bar in Minneapolis one evening in the mid-1950s with his second wife, Anne, the two of them joking back and forth, when Berryman volunteered that he ‘hated the name Mabel more than any other female name’. Anne decided Henry was the name she found ‘unbearable ...”

“... Register called it ‘Silly Billy’s Tomfoolery’ and dismissed its ‘indecent trash’. John Bull said that ‘the dirty abominations of the raffs of literature are far below notice,’ then devoted three issues to reviews, spoofs and comments on the book. They even got hold of one of his letters to her, and published it (thus, ironically, doing a ...”

“... in class and the kids feel righteous – righteous but cosy. A Walk to Pubble Shrub Gardens for John and Tina McClelland This fawn plastic box contains my archive, a ghat of paper I set single words on like a loyal wife who must turn to ash and bone out of love. It’s the grist, I lie to them, for a curt essay on the Girondins whom of course I condemn ...”

“... the agenda for much of Italian national life, both public and private. In the early 1960s, Pope John XXIII’s famous encyclicals, Mater et magistra (1961) and Pacem in Terris (1963), together with his summoning of the Second Vatican Council, produced great ferment in the Catholic world. But the radical tide ebbed, and the long and powerful pontificate of ...”

“... Lundenburh. The Strand is recorded in charters as the Akemannestrete – the road to Bath – and took a sharp right at a hamlet called Cierring (Charing Cross), went up what is now the Haymarket and carried on west past the Ritz and Harrods. Quite wiggly for a Roman road. It’s not until 1100 that a surviving building is named, Westminster Hall. At the ...”

“... In October last year, after discussions that took place over just nine days, the BBC agreed to take the funding of the World Service off the hands of the government from 2014. At the same time, as part of the Comprehensive Spending Review, the Foreign Office announced a 16 per cent cut – £46 million – in the World Service budget ...”

“... North Americans they’d have a good fifteen minutes of warning before any nuclear attack. He took sick leave for depression and had panic attacks; he had been hospitalised, and reported regularly for electroshock therapy years after his release. His mother also had depression, and one of his nephews had schizophrenia. But for mid-century American ...”

“... The first volume of John Lehmann’s autobiography, published in 1955, starts: When I try to remember where my education in poetry began, the first image that comes to mind is that of my father’s library at the old family home of Fieldhead on the Thames. It is an autumn or winter evening after tea, for James the butler has been in to draw the blinds and close the curtains, and my father is reading under a green-shaded lamp ...”

“... out on Jason’s boat with our wives, On our way to Block Island, With our friend the novelist John Marquand Who wrote under the name John Phillips Because he was the son of the novelist John Marquand, All of us hungover from the night before at George’s, And under the heatstroke ...”

“... he’s gone and joined this weird sect. He sits in a cave with his guru, a batty old bugger called John and scribbles on scrolls stuff to scare you while the rabbi goes rabbiting on. He seems dead to us does my brother. He’s been so thoroughly brainwashed by John ‘I look in your eyes,’ said our mother ‘But the bright ...”

“... the country in search of old records that a handful of them – Skip James, Son House, Mississippi John Hurt – were ‘rediscovered’. They became draws on the coffee-house and festival circuit, while recordings by John Lee Hooker, Muddy Waters and Howlin’ Wolf, who had made their names playing house-rocking, amplified ...”

“... Pilkington had been a pet of Swift’s and had received from him harsh treatment that she took for affection: sardonic put-downs, peremptory instructions and plenty of pinching. ‘The Dean’, as she always calls him, showed her his poems and letters and instructed her in literature, though he was ‘a very rough sort of a Tutor’. In the early ...”

“... except how to please him ... I always loved the sort of people who were cool towards me, and only took me for what I was worth ... There is the case of Dyakov ... I shall never forget the night when we were travelling from Pirogovo, and, wrapped up under a travelling rug, I wanted to kiss him and cry. There was sensuality in that feeling, but why it ...”