“... under suspicion of having murdered Thomas Pole. Nearly everyone believes him guilty, since the two young men had been seen to quarrel. Both had been drinking heavily for a fortnight, and when Pole was found ‘with his head crushed under a fearful blow’ Doull took fright and bolted from the island. Whether or not it was he who killed Pole, he can’t ...”

“... poet to have been keen on boxing and, apparently, quite good at it: we may think of Lord Byron and Robert Graves. But few others, surely, have written and worried so concernedly about the ethics of this sport, its moral justification. Ring of Truth, his first novel since The Big Time in 1965, returns hungrily to Scannell’s old problem. Can deliberate ...”

“... North & South (1946), and a Pulitzer Prize in 1956 for her second, A Cold Spring. Writing to Robert Lowell in 1958, she confesses to feeling ‘green with envy’ over Lowell’s ‘kind of assurance’ in the poems of Life Studies, and adds that ‘it is hell to realise one has wasted half one’s talent through timidity.’ Bishop’s ‘timidity’ is ...”

“... Herbert Matthews stepped into a jeep with some anti-government activists and went to meet the young Fidel Castro in the Sierra Maestra. Castro was supposed to be dead: sailing from Mexico a few months earlier, he had arrived on the coast of Oriente province with 82 men, and was immediately bombarded by coastguard vessels and army aircraft. The Havana ...”

“... suite for solo piano, Vingt Regards sur l’enfant-Jésus. The performer was Yvonne Loriod, a young pianist who would later become Messiaen’s wife. Reciting texts infused with Catholic mysticism after each movement, Messiaen struck the critic Bernard Gavoty as a ‘lunatic curator of a vanished museum’; Poulenc described his followers, the so-called ...”

“... credit scheme by which undergraduates can earn a home degree by study abroad. The brightest young European minds will be drawn magnetically to Britain. British universities continue to be major exporters to traditional Anglophone markets, sustaining an imperial authority long after Empire has vanished. Expatriate Britons and natives who have profitably ...”

“... November 2018 when I got a message telling me that a 16-year-old boy had killed himself in Polmont Young Offender Institution, which lies between Glasgow and Edinburgh. My contact had seen a newspaper column I’d written about the suicide a few months earlier of another prisoner at Polmont, a young woman called Katie ...”

“... The Peter Wright trial in Australia has recently brought out the full absurdity of this, with Sir Robert Armstrong attempting at one point to suggest that the very existence of MI5 and MI6 (let alone the identity of their directors) was a secret which could neither be confirmed nor denied. There is no other state in the world which behaves like this and ...”

“... publication in 1967 of a drastically abbreviated and expurgated edition, incompetently edited by Robert Rhodes James, which was greeted with widespread ridicule and contemptuous comparison with Nicolson. After Coats died in 1990, the diaries passed to Channon’s son, Paul, who died in 2007. Now, with the encouragement of his children, three formidable ...”

“... within a sinister closed shrine. Into this archipelago of confinement step Jacob de Zoet, a young clerk from the Netherlands who is hoping to earn his fortune; and Aibagawa Orito, a young midwife whose skill has earned her the privilege of studying under the island’s physician, Dr Marinus, and thus of being, apart ...”

“... A young god​ sits astride a bull. It has been forced to its knees and its head has been pulled back so the god can hold a dagger to its throat, or to its neck, or its shoulder. In some versions he has already plunged the dagger in and drops of blood have begun to fall to the ground. The god wears a billowing cloak and a distinctive bonnet ...”

“... Updike, a friend and rival – Norman Mailer called Cheever and him ‘the Old Pretender and the Young Pretender of the New Yorker’ – ringing the doorbell and being answered by Cheever, bombed out of his mind and stark naked. Home before Dark struck some people as devotedly filial, sensitive and moving etc, and struck others as an upmarket Mommy ...”

“... of the judges of the Victorian Premier’s Prize for First Fiction, of not giving the award to a young writer who has perpetrated one of the greatest frauds in Australia’s rich history of literary hoaxes and deceptions. Before she was exposed, Helen Demidenko, as she styled herself (Helen Darville as she in fact is), might have seemed to be one of the ...”

“... feelings spread varies from species to species. A wolf or a wild dog suckles her pack-mate’s young, and, it is said, even human wolf-children. A sheep, on the other hand, defends herself against rearing others. Lambs run through the whole herd, and could easily steal milk if allowed to. But a ewe learns her own new-born’s smell as she licks off the ...”

“... novel and the theatre in Pilkington’s life and writing. Pilkington played a variety of roles: young poetic prodigy, disobedient daughter (a part forced on her by her parents, who agreed to let her marry her persistent suitor, the charming aspiring poet Matthew Pilkington, as long as the couple pretended to have eloped against her ...”