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“... of money, jealousy, hero-worship – and thusward’. He once objected to an exam question on Stephen Vincent Benét (‘I could not permit my mind to be profaned by such intellectual whorishness’) and wrote an essay on Paul Valéry instead. ‘To know you is a calamity,’ one of his classmates told him.Schwartz would sequester himself in his ...”

“... the parentheses that never close, the borrowed cosmologies and hermetic speculations of a young writer who seems to have heeded Jack Spicer’s advice and read the weirdest stuff on which he could lay hands. There were no job offers from Chatto or Faber for this particular poet, but in the Sixties at least there were casual openings in the East London ...”

“... and simply has the corpses pecked by ‘crows and shrikes’. Jean Calais – a pseudonym for Stephen Rodefer – is Villon’s most interesting ‘translator’. Running casually between version and imitation, Rodefer makes every tactical misprision that it’s possible to make. The result feels faithful in the broadest sense. Where, at the end of ...”

“... 15, 1999. Greatly missed, you touched my life and I will never forget. Peace perfect peace. – Stephen King, Ulster Unionist Party. I’m in Belfast also because I’m dropping Michael at the airport – he’s flying back to England to get his A-level results on 19 August. I reflect that the big cultural divide in British society between state and ...”

“... constituted, fatal to all original undertakings of every kind. I never courted it then, when I was young and in high blood, and one of its ‘curled darlings’; and do you think I would do so now, when I am living in a clearer atmosphere? In assembling his symposium on Byron’s Political and Cultural Influence, Paul True-blood contributes to an intermediate ...”

“... secretly prefer this arrangement. ‘What Congress wants isn’t power so much as deniability,’ Stephen Holmes has suggested. It is less interested in claiming a president’s successes than in disowning his failures. ‘He is sovereign​ who decides,’ in the words of the Nazi jurist Carl Schmitt, and the American president’s bomb power is one of the ...”

“... brood he had so confidently anticipated, but he had reproduced the atmosphere of his own young manhood, with a father-figure reluctantly obeyed but not much liked. He had wanted to be our friend, and to break the pattern, but had no idea how to realise this new approach to family. Much easier to blame Mum for her tenderness than acknowledge that his ...”

“... influences was regularly exposed as untenable. Marlowe’s Edward II, for example, shows how the Young Mortimer – who in the name of the ancient constitution rids Edward’s court of Piers Gaveston and then of his pampered successors, the Spencers – inevitably goes on to rid it of the king too. (Once made protector, however, Mortimer abuses the same ...”

“... I have examined the case of the unhappy Convicts lately transmitted from Scotland; as to the Young Man I am very willing to Shew mercy, as to the Woman, I cannot see it quite in the same light, but think it may not be improper to send to the proper Office in Scotland for a Report with regard to the Woman, as I am ever desirous to be perfectly convinc’d ...”

“... But like several clever men who went out to India – Virginia Woolf’s uncle James Fitzjames Stephen, for example – his intelligence only intensified his reactionary instincts. Brought up in the lawless backwoods of Co. Tipperary, O’Dwyer believed in Order first and last (and not much Law to go with it). He regarded any reforms designed to give ...”

“... Gabriel Atkin, Ivor Novello, Noël Coward, Rex Whistler and above all the unbearable Stephen Tennant with his pearls and tantrums – but these tortuous episodes, in which Sassoon often gave as much hell as he got, are greatly revealing of his dissatisfaction as well as evocative of the period.Wilson quotes freely from Sassoon’s verse, the ...”

“... request reports on the latest sightings from RAF Fighter Command, and invited witnesses such as Stephen Darbishire, a schoolboy who in 1954 took photos of a UFO in Cumbria, to meet him at Buckingham Palace. He also amassed a large collection of books on the subject. Towards the end of his life, he read The Halt Perspective (2016), about the Rendlesham ...”

“... from severe asthma and analysts could be chary about ‘tackling an asthmatic’, as Adrian Stephen, Virginia Woolf’s brother, had put it when he refused to take him on), and then to begin a training analysis with Sylvia Payne the following year. The training was ‘rushed through’, she later said, because so many analysts were away doing war and ...”

“... conflict. Shakespeare’s omission of these geopolitical contexts are perhaps an example of what Stephen Greenblatt has called his ‘strategic opacity’ – a gap into which we are encouraged to place our own interpretations. But there is more to say about the significance of ignored sources. Editors and critics have tended to think about Shakespeare’s ...”

“... a Ron Paul 2008 sweatshirt. Everyone was trying to find the actual DOGE engineers in the crowd of young men. ‘I’m sick of Elon,’ a political consultant told me. ‘He’s not funny. After he’s done doing all of this, he better give a billion dollars to the midterm elections.’ A senior State Department official was sandwiched into a corner at the top ...”