“... Yeats, he must have been aware of the kind of criticism he would encounter. ‘At one stroke,’ Philip Larkin wrote, ‘he lost his key subject and emotion – Europe and the fear of war – and abandoned his audience together with their common dialect and concerns.’ Responding to Auden’s death in 1973, Anthony Powell was less circumspect: ‘No more ...”

“... of Ladyton, or John Hutton, now Baron Hutton of Furness, or Bob Ainsworth, or the Conservatives’ Philip Hammond or Liam Fox – was prepared to answer. For those not directly affected, the acceptable form of exculpation and remembrance involves obliterating any consideration of dead Afghans and folding the British war dead into a single mass of noble ...”

“... no social democrat: he was the archetypal union boss with a big block vote for repartee. In short, the problem once more requires an understanding of Labour factionalism on different levels and some wariness in conflating them too readily. Crossman’s own position and viewpoint also become more comprehensible in these terms. He was, as has been ...”

“... all Southern Baptists. He let his wife take the girls to the local Presbyterian Church, which fell short of the full Baptist obsession with an angry God, but Averette insisted that Joe and his brothers join him on Sunday mornings in Fairmont’s First Baptist Church, which made no secret of what it thought was important: we preach Jesus Christ crucified risen ...”

“... Russia in 1926 (the first English translation was published in 1929). The cycle comprises 33 very short stories based on Babel’s experiences working for the Red Cavalryman, the newspaper of the Cossack army, during the Russo-Polish War of 1920. The Cossacks in the stories are superhuman figures, and not always well disposed towards the likes of Babel, a ...”

“... think worth while ‘What’s Become of Wystan?’ was the title of a sharp review by Philip Larkin, which began by imagining a pair of readers, one of the early Auden and one of the later, talking entirely at cross-purposes as ‘one spoke of a tremendously exciting English social poet full of energetic unliterary knockabout and unique lucidity ...”

“... for no reason at all; it appears in the structure at whim; it vanishes without further ado. In short, Messiaen’s method never manages to fit in with his discourse, because he does not compose – he juxtaposes.’ ‘When he first entered class, he was very nice,’ Messiaen recalled of Boulez. ‘But he soon became angry with the whole world … Even if ...”

“... In Corso’s hutch, his minders begged for copies of Barbara Pym, while Gregory spoke wistfully of Philip Larkin. Denton Welch was William Burroughs’s main intellectual squeeze. Ferlinghetti had high hopes for Jeremy Reed. The Beats were now heritage fodder, a potential Bloomsbury group. There was even talk of James Ivory optioning a Neal Cassady property. I ...”

“... Mitchell’s mind Byatt belongs to that category of writers ‘who achieve virtuosity in both short and long-form fiction’. She began with the novel – the too-traditional novel – in her undergraduate days at Cambridge, eking it out ‘very obsessively and very slowly, knowing it was no good’, yet knowing she couldn’t write anything else. This ...”

“... done too badly. He had kept the service moving and each contribution brief: he had not sold God short and even allowing for the saxophone solo and the old lady currently in full, if tiny, voice it had never ceased to be a church service. Treacher had come along hoping to find Father Jolliffe a bit of a clown and over-anxious to please. There had been no ...”

“... owed his international reputation to the two great volumes on the Mediterranean in the age of Philip II which he published in 1949, and to his trilogy on the material civilisation of world capitalism, which appeared between 1967 and 1979. He died a few months before the first volumes of his incomplete final work came out in 1986. More local in topic, and ...”

“... odds were always changing. Though the bookies were sure to win in the long run, the outcome in the short term could be pretty uncertain: horses can do the strangest things. Bookmakers – including the one I worked in – often had very bad weeks, when the results went against them, though they rarely had bad months and almost never bad years. FOBTs give ...”

“... of blackmail, “Oh, nearly, nearly to the Reservoir!”’ At the beginning of writing in this short form, Frame seems to have had a vivid idea of what she was pursuing. She described the process as ‘more like chasing butterflies or mosquitoes than netting a swarm of words … I “capture” them by writing down their titles.’She suggested to Money ...”

“... euphemism and cliometric excursi, thus cerebralising and, thereby, desensitising the trauma. In short, confronted by the catastrophic dimension of Irish history, the discomfiture of the modern school of value-free historians is apparent. So is the source of their discomfiture: a conception of professionalism which denies the historian recourse to value ...”

“... I was God.’ Once a god, always a god? And yet always a reviser. On other days he can sound like Philip Larkin. Were there two Lowells, or only one? Lowell employed the term ‘dual personality’, a term which belongs to literature, and which also belongs to 19th-century medicine. The meaning of the term has remained uncertain: but it is certain that ...”