“... self-assertion. In the age of post-Revolutionary national movements, Mary becomes an analogue of Marianne (emblem of her people’s liberty, for whom the fraternal citizenry are willing to shed their blood), or even of Marie-Antoinette (personification of her country’s violated old order, to be defended by a thousand chivalric swords). Either way, The ...”

“... to Charles Monteith, his worldly editor at Faber and Faber, as a ‘simple ploughboy from the north’, which he certainly wasn’t. In his bouncy Memoirs of the Forties (1965), Julian Maclaren-Ross offers a memorable portrait of Graham brooding over his pint, a man with whom it was impossible to get things right, ‘not unpleasant, just inordinately ...”

“... more clarity is desirable. In his note for ‘My Cats’, May refers to Smith’s aside about the North Berwick witch trials, but doesn’t give a variant: in the printed version, the witch likes to ‘ruffle up his pride/And watch him skip and turn aside’; in performance, she watched the cat ‘spit’, not ‘skip’. You want to be reminded of Smith’s ...”

“... Dior, Louis Vuitton, Givenchy, fine champagne and cognac – alleged by the weekly magazine Marianne to make €3 million an hour, has cropped up twice in my exchanges with activists, on one occasion with a volunteer medic tending demonstrators injured by the police. She told me she earned around €1100 a month from her job as a careworker for the ...”

“... but I was unable to explain why.The Arctic would have been easier, but I had no desire to head North. I wanted white and ice as far as the eye could see, and I wanted it in the one place in the world which was uninhabited. I wanted my white bedroom extended beyond reason. I wanted a place where Sister Winniki couldn’t exist. That was Antarctica, and only ...”