“... was never permitted to become a defining feature of Irish Catholic culture.’ Frank Duff, who founded the Legion of Mary and was perhaps the most influential Catholic layman of the time, ‘was an able defender of the Jewish community’, as were some of his colleagues. Anti-semitism in Ireland was kept on the fringes of the Catholic ...”

“... gunning the lines. I’ve never had a hand grenade thrown at me, but a rifle grenade struck rather close. Maybe I’ll get a hand grenade later. He could never laugh at the young man he had been. He laughed instead at the writers the young man had read and who were kind to him. The epigraph to The Torrents of Spring is from Fielding: ‘The only source of the ...”

“... to be to see what fresh daily complaint you can hurl at my hot head’. Yet they were remarkably close. Both rose early – often at 4 a.m. – and both had a strong desire to be useful. After resisting for many years, Waldorf allowed her to convert him to Christian Science, to which she had turned after a bout of persistent bad health. ‘It couldn’t be ...”

“... worked between creels. Maxwell’s last book, Raven Seek Thy Brother is a darker, more frank affair. It opens on the hillside above Camusfeàrna, now forested, with Maxwell ‘surveying what I had done to Camusfeàrna … what I had done to the animals and what I had done to myself’. He presents two photographs. In the first, the house in ...”

“... Fish’, the rainbow-bird of ‘Sonnet’, the ‘multi-coloured’ stones catching the sun at the close of ‘The End of March’. In ‘Santarém’, intriguingly, it is a certain Mr Swan who demands ‘What’s that ugly thing?’ when he spies the empty wasps’ nest that Bishop admired so much in the ‘blue pharmacy’ that the pharmacist gave the nest ...”

“... begins 15 blocks north); and Kazin’s apartment at 111th Street is said to be conveniently close to the George Washington Bridge, which is in fact at 186th Street and nearby only to a fanatical walker like Kazin. These are extremely minor things but they lead you to wonder whether Cook has ever been to New York. Similarly, he doesn’t seem that ...”

“... dogs; once the hounds have ripped them apart, their market value is decreased. Hannah’s novel is frank about the sexual abuse of black women, which reinforces the South’s ‘domestic institution’ by breeding more slaves, and in addition poisons the marriages of the whites. She describes how white mistresses and black maids grow ...”

“... In the 1964 film Robin and the Seven Hoods, when someone compares ‘Robbo’ (Frank Sinatra) to Robin Hood, one of the gangsters asks: ‘Who’s Robin Hood?’ And another replies: ‘Well, he was a hood, some Englishman who lived long ago and had an operation going for him in the forest. And I guess the "robin” means he stole birds ...”

“... the decades proceed, the possibilities shift. When a male graduate student joins the programme – Frank S. Hogg is his Mad Magazine name – he ends up with the new Pickering Fellow from Mount Holyoke, Miss Sawyer. They both keep working, and Sawyer goes on to win a prestigious prize. Later Bart Bok, just 22, turns up, and is starry-eyed for Miss ...”

“... backed the creation of a committee to investigate the CIA’s domestic spying, headed by Senator Frank Church. But the committee also came across evidence of the CIA coup in Chile, as well as the Kennedy brothers’ efforts to have Fidel Castro assassinated. Church, an aspiring presidential candidate and devotee of Camelot, chose not to look too closely into ...”

“... and a desperate battle over Sangin in 2013 … attracted little attention’. In 2012, when Frank Ledwidge was researching his book, which tallies the personal and financial cost of Britain’s Helmand campaign, he approached all six ministers who had held the defence portfolio since the start of the operation to ask what they thought its legacy would ...”

“... and a ‘hyper-aestheticised imagination’. Rickword likes the political poems. So does Frank Jellinek, who said in 1934 that they were ‘more valuable than his presence [in Paris] could have been’. But these poems ought to pose more of a problem than they have for Rimbaud’s admirers on the left. ‘L’Orgie Parisienne’ casts the insurgent ...”

“... body of Americans most disliked’ about his work, Himes believed, ‘was the fact that I came too close to the truth.’ He wasn’t wrong in thinking that something beyond pure aesthetic judgment had prevented him from reaching a wider audience. Long before Himes left America for good, he had committed what, for black writers of the era, was a kind of ...”

“... Kingdom you are speaking of three separate jurisdictions. Northern Ireland’s has moved in fairly close conformity with that of England and Wales in terms of public law (although on some topics, notably the use and misuse of public interest immunity to protect national security, England and Wales could well learn from the jurisprudence of Northern ...”

“... and Schulz to be? AA: I discovered Kafka here in Israel during the 1950s, and as a writer he was close to me from my first contact. He spoke to me in my mother tongue, German, not the German of the Germans but the German of the Hapsburg Empire, of Vienna, Prague and Chernovtsy, with its special tone, which, by the way, the Jews worked hard to create. To my ...”