“... and absence. ‘A Morning in Vicenza’ goes on to become an elegy to two admired friends, Joseph Brodsky and Krzysztof Kieslowski, but it could have gone anywhere (I quoted the first of its three stanzas). This unpredictability, storylessness, geographical unattachment, is a feature of Zagajewski; the Selected Poems (cut down from a somewhat longer ...”

“... which he, a Jew, had experienced at first hand, in Austria, Germany and Holland. As his friend Michael Hamburger wrote, ‘no wonder Jakov Lind has become a specialist in the monstrous!’ The Continent was insupportable, he couldn’t live in Israel, indomitable Churchillian England was the place for him. And yet what brought him over was the most ...”

“... to the five I have just mentioned, Paul de Man, Max Loreau, Jean-Marie Benoist, Edmond Jabès, Joseph Riddel, Michel Servière, Louis Marin, Sarah Kofman and Emmanuel Levinas. Six of the pieces are published here in English for the first time. The editors, Pascale-Anne Brault and Michael Naas, are sensitive to what might ...”

“... It’s a good answer, and Ayckbourn no doubt took it kindly and got the point. But it bothers Michael Billington, who can’t tell the story without cleaning it up, indeed turning it into a testimonial. ‘That was not brusqueness or rudeness – Ayckbourn testifies that Pinter was an extremely nice guy – but simply an absolute belief in the self ...”

“... would do – trash, garbage, junk, waste. After doing some art teaching, doing displays at Joseph Horne Department Stores, Warhol became, without trying too hard, the ghost in the art-world machine. ‘A white rabbit’, ‘a saint’, ‘a born loser’ (Gore Vidal), ‘a window-decorator type’ (Truman Capote): it really doesn’t matter how you ...”

“... Introducing Karen Solie, I would adapt what Joseph Brodsky said some thirty years ago of the great Les Murray: ‘It would be as myopic to regard Mr Murray as an Australian poet as to call Yeats an Irishman. He is, quite simply, the one by whom the language lives.’ Solie is Canadian (born in 1966, in Moose Jaw, Saskatchewan, of Norwegian immigrant stock), the author of three previous books of poems, Short Haul Engine (2001), Modern and Normal (2005) and Pigeon (2009), and now this ‘new and selected’, and, yes, she is the one by whom the language lives ...”

“... first things we see, but the voiceover – Carol Reed himself in the English version of the film, Joseph Cotten in the American one – is already telling us the past is someone else’s memory. ‘I never knew the old Vienna before the war with its Strauss music, its glamour and easy charm … I really got to know it in the classic period of the black ...”

“... had involved not just military force but a dynastic switch: Maximilian’s elder brother, Franz Joseph, replaced their uncle Ferdinand on the throne. A dreamy romantic, Maximilian did not approve of his brother’s repressive instincts and was shunted into command of the Austrian navy – a punchline in search of a joke. He planted a luxurious exotic garden ...”

“... was sung to open the games. Only Americans – Dennis Mitchell after winning a 100-metres heat and Michael Johnson after taking the 200-metre gold – puffed out their chests and pulled their jerseys to display the national emblem. Only Americans accused an Irish swimmer of using drugs when she won the Olympic gold. Only an eliminated American boxer, Fernando ...”

“... Two months after the suspension of Stormont in 1972, Belfast’s retiring Lord Mayor, Sir Joseph Cairns, delivered a farewell speech in which he reflected on the political situation. Ulster, he said, had been cynically betrayed by Britain’s policies: policies that had relegated it to ‘the status of a Fuzzy Wuzzy colony ...”

“... origin, and, very rightly in my view, rejects the heresy of Bidev and others, based on research by Joseph Needham, that it was a Chinese invention. He very capably summarises the evidence for its origin in India and its transmission, first to Persia, and then to the whole Islamic world after the Muslim conquest, and from there to Europe, with a brief notice of ...”

“... had he been trying to do the same thing for some group of manual workers. There is Sir Keith Joseph, behaving more than ever like a leading member of a religious sect dedicated to self-flagellation, determined – in an era in which knowledge-intensive activities are increasingly what really count – to reduce even further the Government’s expenditure ...”

“... Some great modern biographies have been written in that manner: I would cite Enoch Powell’s Joseph Chamberlain and Robert Blake’s Disraeli – two other Tory heroes who incidentally, or not so incidentally, turned out to be rogues, Disraeli a most engaging one and Chamberlain the opposite. Powell’s experience with Chamberlain led him to remark on ...”

“... In​ an essay entitled ‘Twenty Minutes from before the War’, Joseph Roth describes how in the 1920s French cinema audiences (and no doubt others elsewhere in Europe) lapped up compilations of pre-1914 documentary footage. They watched endless shots of military parades and goosenecked beauties with hats and fans and all-day hairstyles and floor-length dresses and gentlemen in full fig and they died laughing ...”

“... or abroad. Poets liked him. Seamus Heaney of course liked him, but so did others as dissimilar as Joseph Brodsky, Andrew Motion and (one of his first translators) Robert Bly. Poets were drawn to translate him too: fellow Northerners like Robin Fulton (for a long time now a resident of Norway, though 48 years ago for small reward he was teaching me geography ...”