“... of refrigerators. He’s blasting with warmth out back.Mason & Dixon is the story of two men, Charles Mason (1728-86) and Jeremiah Dixon (1733-79). Both are drawn from history, as is the outline of their doings, and as are many of the acquaintances they happen upon en route. Mason begins the tale as an astronomer at Greenwich; Dixon as a journeyman ...”

“... sharp, bold stories, children’s literature can be a form of distillation: of what it means to hope, to fear, to yearn, distilled down and down into a piece of concentrated meaning. But you cannot claim to be a magician and fail to produce the rabbit. Let us begin, therefore, at the beginning, with some beginnings:When Mary Lennox was sent to Misselthwaite ...”

“... my toughest competitor – if not in content, only in style?’ he asked. ‘Prince Charles,’ he answered. ‘I’m thinking of becoming an entertainer,’ he also said. ‘Liza Minnelli gets $75,000 a night to sing, and I’m really curious as to how I would do.’ ‘Yes,’ Andersen wrote, ‘in the blockbuster 1999: Casinos of the Third ...”

“... only his name but his age as well. Larkin at Sixty can’t therefore do anything but make a reader hope for just that: a Portrait of the Artist. There are, it is true, a handful of pleasantly occasional photographs, and what seems in reproduction a surprisingly bad drawing of the poet, but the text may foil anyone whose ‘Larkin’ is the author of the three ...”

“... de Charrière’s ‘The Nobleman’, is still plot-heavy and without psychological nuance. Charles Perrault’s ‘Bluebeard’ seems at home in this cardboard company.Perhaps not all tales are short stories. These early examples are rudimentary as to motive and situation. McGuinness’s wide-angle introduction (the same in both volumes) argues that ...”

“... close relationship with Reagan to bring him back into line. That was something Kinnock could never hope to match: she had more clout in the White House than any other world leader, never mind a leader of the opposition. (This advantage was to be rammed home the following year when Kinnock paid a trip to Washington and Reagan’s team humiliated him ...”

“... the globetrotting emerging markets player and the British nationalist who treasures a portrait of Charles I made of hair taken from his chopped-off head. Surely there was some hypocrisy, some startling moment of double standards that would force Rees-Mogg to apologise, to admit, faced with the awful glare of public disapproval, that he’d been caught in a ...”

“... Dryden: A Literary Life (1991) asserts that Dryden could most certainly have realised his early hope to ‘make the world some part of amends for many ill plays by an heroic poem’. Hammond goes on: The writing of an heroic poem was thwarted, however, not by any lack of abilities on Dryden’s part, but by his failure to find patronage. What might easily ...”

“... was at its climax. Outside food shops, women had huddled all night on frosty pavements in the hope of a few slices of sausage. In the morning, 11 November was restored as Independence Day, commemorating the moment in 1918 when Piłsudski took over military command from Poland’s foreign occupiers, and that evening a huge patriotic demonstration swept ...”

“... have tried to comfort themselves by putting this down to her novelty value, a quality they hope will pass its expiry date well before the November election, and by dismissing her as another Dan ‘Potatoe’ Quayle or Admiral ‘Who am I? What am I doing here’ Stockdale, two of the last century’s most memorably inept vice-presidential choices. Many ...”

“... began in the matriarchal age, and derives its magic from the moon, not from the sun. No poet can hope to understand the nature of poetry unless he has had a vision of the Naked King crucified to the lopped oak, and watched the dancers, red-eyed from the acrid smoke of the sacrificial fires, stamping out the measure of the dance, their bodies bent uncouthly ...”

“... in touch with anecdotal letters, discussions of craft and influence. When Welch corresponded with Charles Olson, on the East Coast, he told him that he had ‘finally taken to the woods, I hope for ever’. Like Snyder, he kept a gun. There was a bad moment when his companion in solitude, a cat called Stanley, dragged ...”

“... Watching Footballers’ Wives I see among the production credits the name Sue de Beauvoir.I do so hope she’s a relation.1 February, Yorkshire. Last time we visited Kirkby Stephen we were in Mrs H.’s shop when a clock chimed. I’ve never wanted a clock and this one was pretty dull, made in the 1950s probably and very plain. But the chime, a full ...”

“... for birds and nature, and for Loriod, his wife and musical collaborator.Olivier​ Eugène Prosper Charles Messiaen was born on 10 December 1908 in Avignon. His father was a schoolteacher, his mother a poet. He spent his early years in Grenoble before moving with his family to Paris in 1919, when his father, Pierre, was hired to run a lycée in the Marais. The ...”

“... orator in Europe, and see him talk with his fingers,’ Talleyrand may have said: he was with Charles Fox and his deaf son, then at school in Hackney, a spin-off from Edinburgh. In the medium term Leipzig had the greatest influence, for it and the later German establishments became the home of the ‘pure’ oral method. In 1880, at a world congress in ...”