“... over the still stream,/Up the hill-side’) and so brings Keats’s poem to an unpremeditated close. Carver’s poem sets about capturing the quotidian and resists the charms of art, but ends up as art anyhow. Keats is no less self-conscious, but his poem works in almost the opposite way: he is wholly smitten with the charms of art (‘the viewless wings ...”

“... when Avedon got back to the US, his father was still alive, ready, as it were, for that final close-up. It was a story he had told before, I don’t doubt; it was neatly turned without being glib and, clearly, he enjoyed the effect it had on me, a complete stranger. But I also believe that it happened exactly as he told it. For days afterwards that pact ...”

“... She detested coarse language, which Twain had picked up in his knockabout youth. Nor did she like frank language, which was Twain’s stock in trade, and she was equally disturbed, perhaps even frightened, by Twain’s nose for the whiff of hypocrisy. He went for it immediately, much as a Jack Russell terrier would snap at the neck of a mewling kitten. Livy ...”

“... and the other poets of what would come to be known as the Black Mountain School, Duncan paid close mind to Olson’s injunction to ‘USE USE USE the process at all points.’ His distrust of revision was akin to a mystic’s antinomianism: the idea wasn’t to abandon form but to commit himself to ‘a faith in the voice’s telling that we ...”

“... and spiritual seekers who gathered around Emerson in the late 1830s in rural Concord.* At the close of that book, Fuller had begun her famous ‘Conversations’ for women in Boston, aimed at remedying ‘defects’ in her pupils’ education and encouraging them to think and speak for themselves. Under her guidance, the women analysed Greek myths, wrote ...”

“... select audiences, Morris observes, Zionist leaders like David Ben-Gurion and Moshe Sharrett were frank about the reasons for Arab revolt against British rule and Zionist immigration from 1936 to 1939. The violence derived not from a Levantine strain of European anti-semitism, but from the fact that, in Ben-Gurion’s words, ‘we and they want the same ...”

“... involved with the centrifuge programme, which only gets a few mentions in his book. According to Frank von Hippel, professor of public and international affairs at Princeton and a former assistant director for national security in the White House, ‘Iraq had difficulty producing reliable [centrifuge] machines’ and ‘no [centrifuge] production facility ...”

“... for not making clear the homosexuality of Stravinsky’s younger brother Gury, to whom he was close, and whose early death left him feeling he had ‘an unrepayable debt’. Craft makes the persuasive point that ‘Stravinsky’s protectiveness toward his androgynous friends – Cocteau, Eugene Berman, Poulenc, Henze, Boulez, Copland, Carlos ...”

“... already had a powerbase there, and he embodied the connection between province and court. As a Frank married to a Bavarian noblewoman, Keila, he used the classic entrée to provincial standing. In the 790s, he had established his reputation in the office of seneschal, responsible for feeding the royal household. The court scholars gave him the nickname ...”

“... the National Book Award for Between the World and Me, his essay on race and violence. Coates’s close friend Prince Jones was killed in Virginia in 2000. ‘When Prince Jones died, there were no cameras. There was nobody looking. The officer that killed him was not prosecuted. He was not even disciplined by the police force.’ In the Cincinnati ...”

“... itself may not have included the bit about ‘being placed on an equality’ or the queen’s frank recognition of the events of 1857-58 as being ‘a bloody civil war’ rather than ‘a mere military mutiny’. But it did enter the Indian consciousness. By 1875, many educated Indians could recite it by heart. Meetings of the Indian National Congress ...”

“... recalled. O’Brien told me that she wanted ‘their diaries, their souls’, and referred to Anne Frank. But the girls she met were ‘very shy, and also reluctant to talk’. Committed to producing a work of fiction that had documentary authority, she made contact with social workers, doctors and journalists.The real mistake​ , seen so often in travel ...”

“... million last year, despite warnings from watchdogs and experts, but then failed to raise anything close to that sum. Under Johnson, the Conservatives received donations of £5.7 million in the first week of the 2019 election campaign. Sunak raised barely a third of that in the entire 2024 campaign. When the alleged racist comments about Diane Abbott made by ...”

“... Rossellini – but also about recent films such as Alien: Resurrection (‘inventive, honest and frank’) and Paul Verhoeven’s Starship Troopers (‘I’ve seen it twice and I like it a lot’).At some point I wrote a fan letter to David Thomson. In his reply, he urged me to develop interests other than film. That was Spielberg’s problem, Thomson said ...”

“... warmth. Because he had spent so much time in prison and then in New York, he had no set of close friends or trusted comrades. His judgment was also flawed; his initial sense that there was a new energy in Irish nationalism proved to be wrong.In 1907, politically and culturally, Dublin could just as easily have seemed what James Joyce called ‘a centre ...”