“... so. Perhaps we are in the realm of that more general, sexually innocent homoeroticism discussed by Paul Fussell in The Great War and Modern Memory (1975) or in Martin Taylor’s less fashionable, less thesis-driven anthology, Lads, republished in 1998. In Taylor’s collection, so often are the poems bad, unaware (Ronald-like?) or puny that the best among them ...”

“... jokes about Clinton are always the same joke. ‘When he comes to a fork in the road,’ writes Paul Greenberg of the Arkansas Democrat-Gazette, ‘he takes it.’ He wants to have his dozen Big Macs and eat them too. And so forth. (I myself have contributed a one-liner: ‘Why did Bill Clinton cross the road? Because he wanted to get to the middle.’) In ...”

“... It was only when I got to the chapter featuring two people whose work I happen to know and love, Paul Bowles and Jean Genet, that the spell was broken. All of a sudden, this oddfellow’s odyssey didn’t feel quite so whimsical – it felt borderline exploitative, as though she was using these people, or their memory, to make herself look good. Bowles was ...”

“... of American writing in the 1940s, Agee was a Southerner, from Knoxville, Tennessee, who came North, stayed and prospered. The story that these details suggest, of exile and nostalgia, is more pertinent than the data of Agee’s education, employment, marriages. He enjoyed wide recognition and often enough he finished his projects. Yet the things he ...”

“... included . . . Alexander Haig Jr, Max Kampelman, Anthony Lake, Samuel Lewis, Joseph Lieberman, Paul Wolfowitz and Mortimer Zuckerman’. Wolfowitz, Rumsfeld’s Deputy Secretary of Defense, is, along with Perle, best known as an architect of the regime change in Iraq. (‘Regime destruction’ may be a more accurate term.) The report noted: ‘Almost ...”

“... Culture. The Singing Boys is no doubt meant to recall Middleton’s early work for the Children of Paul’s, one of those boy companies whose performances were punctuated by songs and entr’acte music; but the fleshly grossness of Merrymakers at Shrovetide plunges us straight into the world of the plays themselves. The analogy is suggested by Taylor in an ...”

“... say’, ‘to be sure’), to rank with Alfred Kazin’s A Walker in the City, Willie Morris’s North toward Home, and other urban romances of the ardent outsider whose eyes are on the prize. Still, it’s handy to have it back in print after its long stay in limbo, for documentary purposes. It gives virgin readers an opportunity to see what all the ...”

“... his audience that the Berlin Schools had the edge over the Bauhaus. By then the director, Bruno Paul, had already been dismissed. In 1937 the Nazis staged the Degenerate Art exhibition in Munich. (Salomon, David Foenkinos imagines in his novel, ‘positions herself on the side of the despised artists’.) In 1938, she submitted a piece for an anonymous fine ...”

“... immensely appealing place, not unlike Lead in Yorkshire or Heath near Ludlow. Good graves on the north side, some for a family called Secker who seem to live in the manor house across the field, a romantic rambling house that looks unrestored and has oddly in its grounds an ornate seaside-looking Edwardian clock tower.The Windrush tumbles through the weir on ...”

“... of local universities through huge budget cuts. The city was horribly gerrymandered in the 2010s. Paul Ryan, former Speaker of the House of Representatives and a native of Janesville, Wisconsin, acted as a wrecking ball on social care in the area and was a friend to people who believe that tax cuts are evidence of enlightenment. The Democrats had grown ...”

“... towards nuisance visitors. Taylor is proud of the response to the shaft by previous outsiders: Paul Whitehouse (‘One of those two fishermen’) is making a solo television series. He was taken to Greenwich, where he found the tunnels ‘awesome’. Three generations of Bazalgettes came down at the weekend, along with journalists from the Evening ...”

“... in part thanks to his own struggles as a black Southern refugee who had made his way north – that the obstacles on the road to freedom were as much psychological as economic. The violence and exploitation of imperialism, along with Western education and the secular styles of thought and ideology it exported to the colonies, had created forms of ...”

“... blasts and a recording delivers XR’s apocalyptic version of the shipping forecast: ‘Viking, North Utsire, severe gales, summer heatwaves … moderate or poor, becoming desperate soon.’Trafalgar Square, 7 October 10.30 p.m. A heavy downpour has let up. A young activist – an economist who works in a government department he asks me not to name – is ...”

“... belts’ were unwilling to bend to ‘Eisenhower’s moral strictures at home’. In 2016, the North American Interfraternity Conference joined with the National Panhellenic Conference and agreed to spend $300,000 on lobbying against, among other things, fraternities going co-educational, as they had at Harvard and Wesleyan. They were also calling for ...”

“... and Willesden Green Station on the Metropolitan Line. This was one of several neighbourhoods in North-West London to which prospering Jews tended to migrate from East London in the 1920s and 1930s, the most notorious being Golders Green, otherwise known as Goldberg Green or the Polish Corridor. We were to live in Teignmouth Road till 1940, so it is ...”