“... Warhaft and in memory of Sasha Warhaft 1985-1988 All I can hope is that the voice of Kavadias may be heard, however faintly, from the bridge on a dark night somewhere in the Indian Ocean. Gail Holst Warhaft, translator: The Collected Poems of Nikos Kavadias 1 Tonight, as the tropic day drops its sail and flocks of marabou are flying west, I’m ...”

“... his lips. ‘Stop grieving, Telethusa,’ Isis said. ‘Ignore your husband; keep whatever child may come. You’ve been my loyal worshipper. I’m not ungrateful, and you’ll find me helpful.’ So when the baby, of its own accord, pushed its way out and proved to bed a girl, its mother told the nurse (her only partner in the fraud): ‘Take care of my ...”

“... steel, pearl dimensions. Cézanne: ‘We are an iridescent chaos.’ * Balcony over Lexington, May evening, fog wreath’d towers, gothic dome lit from within, monument of our aspirations turned hollow, abandoned somehow. And later, in the florist’s window on Second Avenue, a queen’s display of orchid and fern, lush heap of dried sheaves, bounty of ...”

“... Despite a new paralysis – my back –Am stirred, perhaps, to mine the new resource,Put down my worn suitcases and unpack.[Publications]Reader, should I turn another page?Fly off to somewhere, maybe even worse?Or limp serenely into middle ageAnd try to flog this flimsy book of verse? [c/o Fig Tree PocketQldAustraliaphotopies ofrelevantdocumentati ...”

“... concerned the first glance is enough: For certain he takes soon what we might late. The rest of us may talk seductive guff Unendingly and not come up to snuff, Whereat we most obscenely fulminate. We say of her that she can’t pass a prick. We call him cunt-struck, stick-man, power tool, Muff-diver, stud, sack artist, motor dick, Getting his end away, dipping ...”

“... wit has scowled. We fume and Rupert Murdoch’s none the worse. And writing in this corset stanza may Be nothing more than flying in the face Of new technology. And now they’re topping Up the latest tank of history at Wapping – A metaphor is when you have one space To fill and all of life to file away. Most metaphor, as Kipling guessed when he Made ...”

“... shop on her own. She never emerges as the monster that Jeremy Seabrook often swears she is. It may be that the process of recalling his childhood projected him back into childish thoughts, though he writes in the voice of an adult trying to make sense of his past. The most casual remarks were sometimes veiled ultimatums, decisions already taken and not ...”

“... When, in May, Alexander Boris de Pfeffel Johnson gives up his role as Tory MP for the Spectator to take over from Michael Heseltine as the editor of Henley-on-Thames, you have to wonder where they’re going to find someone sufficiently blond to be his successor at Doughty Street (from which sturdy address the organ Johnson currently oversees emerges each week ...”

“... black beard. The gold background from which he emerges has a lemony hue. What a presence! In the May sun, the lamassu seems gentle, his smile benign as he looks to the south. Yet I sense that for Rakowitz this gentleness has been hard won. As he conducted it, the family import/export business was a way of making peace, of keeping lines of communication ...”

“... he wanted, we’d have been, like so many Philip Larkins, the less deceived. Some of his readers may wonder, however, why a chief press secretary did not resign like his predecessor if he felt he was being sidelined at a moment – such as now – when a government should have sufficient trust in the mature reactions of its citizens to spin out less ...”

“... be realised, if I happen to get my hands on a guitar when I’m very drunk. And a similar yearning may have played its part in the signing up of first novels by Willy Vlautin, the lead singer of the band Richmond Fontaine, and Will Ashon, who runs Big Dada Recordings: both will be published by Faber later in the year. You wouldn’t catch Ludmilla, the ...”

“... own starveling country want two more of these vagrant landing-strips, whatever the asking price may turn out to be? Two reasons come to mind, both unworthy. We want them because when you choose to go to war they allow you to conduct hostilities, in part at least, extra-territorially, launching air attacks from out to sea without there being any serious risk ...”

“... a formula for ending the welfare state at a stroke. No wonder it is music to Tea Party ears (and may soon be obligatory reading in coalition circles). The demonising of taxation is a perennial of the American right, but what makes Bastiat such excellent Tea Party company is his view that any interferences by government beyond the bare Lockean minimum ...”

“... than a pointless success, you can look at The Pacific and see where ambition and technology may have bled the writing to death. Nobody is talking about this show, which could either mark a change in HBO’s fortunes, a temporary blip, or a wholesale return in our lives to reckless gossiping about who’s sleeping with whom. When I was small I thought ...”

“... the centrepiece of the exhibition Goya: The Witches and Old Women Album (at the Courtauld until 25 May).* Repetition – a wild piling of imbecility on imbecility – is part of the Goya effect. At the show, I tried the experiment of starting at page 1 and giving each sheet of the album three or four minutes, just reading the caption and staring, not turning ...”