“... there, and staying, for a short while at least, in an unemployed miner’s house. His friend Allen Hutt later wrote of this as a turning point in Jennings’s life: his upbringing had instilled in him a Ruskinian obsession with the impact of mechanisation on work and on ways of thinking, but he now encountered at first hand ‘the land of industry, of ...”

“... of his poetic development is that, in middle age, after years of studying under figures such as Allen Tate and R.P. Blackmur, he was able to trust his instincts and veer dramatically off the beaten path established by the New Critics. Michael Hofmann has compared him to ‘a sort of one-off comet that approached that cosy solar system, lit it up for a ...”

“... role in what was supposed to be a French war from an impeccable source – the CIA. George Allen worked on Indochina from 1949 to 1975, by far the longest involvement of any American, a fly on the wall at the decisions of a quarter-century. Allen is a real-life quiet American who saw his job as answering the ...”

“... actually – which were called Freeman, Hardy and Willis – were trained by Barry’s brother, Richard, who showed David how to work with the birds himself. Everything had the appropriate size about it.’ Loach’s sense of ‘appropriate size’ remains to this day the key to his achievement as a filmmaker.Kes marked a conscious departure from the ...”

“... who could be ‘silly like us’.Meeting the 50-year-old Auden, his undergraduate contemporary Richard Crossman observed: ‘The more Wystan talked – and he talked very volubly – the more he revealed that he is now a comfortable unreflective pundit with extremely conventional, washy views.’ Crossman’s own left-wing convictions and streak of ...”

“... in Alistair Cooke’s great account of the time, Generation on Trial. He was the man who made Richard Nixon’s self-serving book, Six Crises (a ‘campaign book’ for an entire career), possible in the first place. Witness, his own work, had a marked influence on Arthur Koestler and on Czeslaw Milosz and is, indeed, the nativist American equivalent of ...”

“... verse, as opposed to more traditional or mainstream poets such as Robert Lowell, James Merrill and Richard Wilbur – the sorts likely to be published in the New Yorker and awarded Pulitzers. In those days, you were on one side or the other. Creeley was defiantly on The New American Poetry side, and his work figures prominently in that hugely influential ...”

“... 1959. ‘It will make far more interesting reading than The Quest for Corvo.’ In the late 1970s, Richard Cobb took the view that Peters merited ‘further study, perhaps even a short biography, as he is fairly outstanding both as an academic fraud and as a bigamist’. To complain that the account we have at last been given is somewhat unrelenting, that the ...”

“... justice of the peace, or the mayor of this city? By what authority do you ask me these things?’ Richard (‘Beau’) Nash was at a loss for a ready reply. The ‘King of Bath’, as he liked to be known, was the gamester son of a Swansea bottlemaker, a heavyweight playboy whose abundant assurance, or chutzpah, had qualified him to act as arbiter of elegance ...”

“... such a take-me-or-leave-me tone. It occurs to you that Miss Didion’s reasons for disliking Woody Allen’s Manhattan, and for attacking it at length in the New York Review, are perhaps largely defensive in origin. What is objectionable about Manhattan is not that it is knowing, cute, ‘in’, as Miss Didion claimed. What is objectionable about ...”

“... or of Cocteau or Fritz Lang or von Sternberg or Arthur Penn or Pasolini or Warhol or Woody Allen, nor a film directed or choreographed by Busby Berkeley, nor, amazingly, a film starring either Garbo or Fred Astaire, nor Shoah. Instead, it finds room for The Quiet Man and The Bridge on the River Kwai, three films by Nicolas Roeg and four by Powell and ...”

“... the country, but that was too ambitious: they’ve never sold as well as Pevsner and his publisher Allen Lane had hoped. One reason may be that Pevsner was too confident of his readers’ ability to reconstruct architectural reality in their imagination. In a sense, he knew it: ‘I have given you the facts,’ he said of Buildings of England. ’You must go ...”

“... bombing crews – I feel sympathetic and sorry for both of them. Jarrell wrote to his wife about Allen Tate’s ‘Ode to Our Young Pro-Consuls of the Air’, a poem which ends with the Dalai Lama being exterminated from the air, saying it was ‘certainly poor and annoying … I thought the Dalai Lama almost the only touch of imagination.’ When he wrote ...”

“... grammar of bonds (or Velcro fasteners). It’s an optimistic project, one that has something of Richard Rorty’s pragmatism. One chapter in the book is given over to ‘attunement’, which Felski defines as the ‘affinities, inclinations, stirrings that often fall below the threshold of consciousness’ but play a key role in our responses to art. Zadie ...”

“... heart’. She fosters nostalgie de la banlieue, the feeling that made one wish V. S. Pritchett and Richard Cobb would never get to the last page of their childhood memories. You could adapt the famous remark about religious sects and say that England has sixty kinds of suburb and only one sauce – except that sixty would be an underestimate and all of them ...”