“... force a rose from the sand. It’s a big, bold blowsy note to open on, and not at all untypical. James Merrill, a poet of some breeding and considerable refinement, once remarked, in his essay ‘On Literary Tradition’, that ‘it’s a bit snotty to nudge the reader too obviously with references to Virgil or Eliot’, but Walcott remains an unashamed ...”

“... a page or two later, is that of Jane Morris as painted by Rossetti (or as described by Henry James): ‘carnal, as the massive white throat testifies … there was almost oriental blue richness, blackness, in the king-fisher wings or waves of hair which overshadowed ce beau visage blanc so abundantly.’One practical ...”

“... in keeping with the neoclassical taste of the time, interspersed with a heavily adapted version of King Lear and Mrs Siddons’s much admired Lady Macbeth. On the new larger stages, selection was made on the basis of scenic opportunities. Henry VIII enjoyed a vogue, as did Colley Cibber’s version of Richard III, famous for the line ‘Off with his head, so ...”

“... lawyer Pat Finucane has prompted MI5 to release documents which may well lead to a public inquiry. King Abdullah has been exposed egging on the US to attack Iran. The Libyan government’s threat of dire retribution if Abdelbaset Ali al-Megrahi died in jail in Scotland concentrated the mind of the UK envoy in Tripoli, who was already talking of his release as ...”

“... the first female home secretary in 2007, but has not been a member of Parliament since 2010. James Timpson, the new minister for prisons, ran the high street cobblers of the same name, which is known for employing ex-offenders. Less well known are David Hanson, minister of state in the Home Office, who was MP for Delyn in North Wales for 27 years and ...”

“... of rhyme. Hecht stands with the strongest formal poets of his generation, Richard Wilbur and James Merrill, who accepted Auden’s legacy and for the most part worked ravishingly within the boundaries it set. There were free-verse poems over the years, but not many, and they were rarely among his best. Hecht’s most personal work is often his most ...”

“... held in celebration of the conquest of Algiers.The Tortuous Streets of Arles: Henry JamesHenry James, visiting in about 1883, in writing about Arles, complains about the streets – he calls them ‘tortuous and featureless’ just as Murray in his Handbook, some thirty years earlier, had described them as forming ‘a labyrinth of dirty narrow ...”

“... Show, Married with Children, Fight Club, The Full Monty, Ally McBeal, Buffy the Vampire Slayer, King of the Hill, Titanic. We can usually think of one or two of these at the same time, but the sheer extent of Murdoch’s businesses is so vast that it is hard to hold them in the mind simultaneously. When his wife Anna filed for divorce and was asked the ...”

“... the ‘constant wife’ Imogen is a ‘tender heire’ – so disguised as a boy that her father King Cymbeline doesn’t recognise her. The disguising stage-conventions of the time (boys playing girls dressed as boys) join Elizabethan word-play and false etymologies to help Shakespeare work out stories of love’s endurance in which gender comes to seem not ...”

“... inherited a taste for drink and drama, a touch of Scottish diablerie with literary affiliations in James Hogg, and in such a novel as George Douglas’s The House with the Green Shutters. These are certainly present in the more sensational side of his work. But Twenty Thousand Streets has a quite different and much more English atmosphere, finding its models ...”

“... of the valley’), records changes in the Rhondda through terrible puns (‘We’ve no news of King Coal’) and an outrageous final conceit: They’re expanding The factory at Merthyr That makes Janet Reger Luxury Lingerie. Anthracite is reclaimed By the dictionary. We read our future In the bottom of a D-cup. Thus my fingers fighting Gordius Behind ...”

“... adoption. At the time of our separation from Great Britain, that power had been exercised by the king, as the chief executive . . . Hence, when the words to grant pardons were used in the Constitution, they conveyed to the mind the authority as exercised by the English crown, or by its representatives in the colonies. There is only one express departure ...”

“... so close to the leather-jacketed, blue-jeaned rock idol (the ‘love child of Bob Dylan and James Brown’, as Jon Stewart joked) that we could almost have fist-bumped. To get this close, we journos had to bring specific photo ID (‘driver’s licence or passport’), be searched, undertake to make notes only with pen and notepad, refrain from ...”

“... In his quirky but compelling book on Burke, The Great Melody, Conor Cruise O’Brien fingers James Mill in his History of British India as one of the first to put the knife in. On the question of India, Mill says, Burke neither stretched his eye to the whole of the subject, nor did he carry its vision to the bottom. He was afraid. He was not a man to ...”

“... first models were Dutch masters (Terborch and Metsu), the ‘indefinable hardness’ which Henry James, writing in 1872, identified does not come from them. Verisimilitude, James says, has become an end in itself: Meissonier understands to a buttonhole the uniform of the Grand Army. He is equally familiar with the facial ...”