“... misleading. It is better understood as having been distilled from ‘I must be seeing things’, said seriously, and with a fair amount of stress on the ‘I must’. The greatest difficulty for the poet is how to go on being one. Randall Jarrell set it out like this at the end of his essay on Stevens: ‘A man who is a good poet at 40 may turn out to be a ...”

“... You are going much too fast,’ Mrs Thatcher said on the News at One on Friday, 10 November, ‘first Poland, then Hungary, then – er, Czechoslovakia, now Eastern Germany ... ’. Heigh-ho, this was Neville Chamberlain’s ‘Czechoslovakia’ all over again, the far-away country of which we know little. The second half of the sentence was omitted from the television interview shown later that day ...”

“... Brecht’s Fear and Misery in the Third Reich on bicycles. We are not told what the critics said about this event. Was it an experience to lift the soul on wings, a mind-blowing epiphany? Or was it in the same class as a file of messenger boys delivering pizzas on unicycles? The author, Pryor Dodge, withholds his own opinion. He is introduced to us, not ...”

“... growled. ‘It’s all male power. It’s as bad as Moscow.’ He nodded towards an obelisk, and said: ‘Why do they have a prick but no cunt? You have enough fucking feminists in this country – why don’t they protest? Why don’t they insist on erecting a cunt, in memory of – I don’t know – Annie Oakley, Marilyn Monroe, the witches of ...”

“... Chronicle, Melbourne, who was Prime Minister, wrote: ‘In this sort of matter there is much to be said upon both sides. A Minister has a great advantage in stating his own views to the public and if Palmerston in the Syrian affair had not as devoted an assistant as the Morning Chronicle, he would hardly have been able to maintain his course or carry through ...”

“... This feeling of forever being somewhere in-between was Ford’s ongoing curse, or so he would have said. And of course the more he pondered it, the worse it got. The either/ors piled up, sometimes to breaking-point. Was he English or German? Pre-1914 he could take his pick, and did – but now, in wartime, a Hueffer could only be a spy. Another spur, this, to ...”

“... neither could the king. This, of course, was a fiction. The king was well informed about what was said and done in the Commons, but he couldn’t be informed officially. This policy had kept more than one member out of prison during the reign of Charles I, and the Commons plea for freedom of speech, made at the beginning of each session by the speaker, was a ...”

“... in some ways very intense, was in reality extremely limited. The partisans of the Administration said, ‘If not now, when?’ and their opponents replied: ‘Why not later?’ The partisans of the Administration said there would be fewer body bags if Saddam was hit at once, and their opponents replied feebly that all body ...”

“... by authorial complaints against Olwyn Hughes, Ted Hughes and the Estate (e.g. David Holbrook, Edward Butscher) or have come to nothing (e.g. Lois Ames, Harriet Rosenstein). Most of the book-length literary criticism is unimpressive. There isn’t much to choose, for example, between Margaret Dickie Uroff (‘As they developed, Plath came to locate herself ...”

“... of her own life: ‘Nothing has happened but loneliness.’ Stevie Smith would not, I think, have said that, though she was much aware of loneliness. Her life was uneventful – if one supposes that D’Annunzio and Hemingway (or Shelley and Byron) led the sort of lives writers should eventfully lead. But Stevie’s life (and I now fall, as Barbera/McBrien ...”

“... v. Boler, the Boche villain of Dornford Yates’s Cost Price:   ‘Look on your own face,’ I said; ‘for, by God, when you see it next, it won’t look the same.’   Then, as a man puts the weight, I put his face to the wall beside the pier-glass – with all my might.   As he slumped to the ground and fell backward, I saw I had kept my ...”

“... I’d ever smelled coming from the kitchen. Ian screamed he was cooking kippers, I thought he said mutilating Flipper, and the girl from Glasgow mumbled something about breakfast and bit deeply into my flesh. This was my introduction to the UK and later 20th-century English literature. Ian wrote fiction for literary magazines, I wrote non-fiction for Time ...”

“... virginal blood and of defloration in primitive societies’. The chief proponent of this view was Edward Westermarck (1862-1939), who, in his monumental History of Marriage, begun in 1891, furnished partial evidence for his theory from Herodotus, and from Brazil, the Caribbean, Senegal, Libya, Morocco, Kurdistan, Cambodia and Malabar, while steadfastly ...”

“... The historian Edward Hallett Carr died on 3 November 1982, at the age of 90. He had an oddly laconic obituary in the Times, which missed out a great deal. If he had died ten years before, his death would probably have been noticed a great deal more, for Carr was an eminent left-wing historian, had a huge record of publication, and had embarked, 35 years before his death, on a History of Soviet Russia which has been described as ‘monumental’ and ‘a classic ...”

“... other remark deserves to be immortalised, which Oppenheimer himself later judged the best thing said at the time. When the blast subsided, the physicist Kenneth Bainbridge, in charge of the test, turned to Oppenheimer and declared: ‘Now we’re all sons of bitches.’ In general, however, the test was a rhetorical dud. After the physicist Samuel Allison ...”