“... observer and metaphor-maker – a poem on a magazine page ‘swimming in a little gel pack of white space’; a freshly laundered shirt emitting, when shaken, ‘the sound of a flag at the consulate of a small, rich country’ – Baker can be entertainingly fussy about vocabulary. ‘“Panties” is a word to be avoided, I feel,’ we’re told in The ...”

“... Hungary, Czechoslovakia and Poland. To the north and east, the vast expanses of the Ukraine and of White Russia. At the back end of Eastern Europe, well this side of the Russia that tourists are allowed to visit, Galicia is now a forgotten zone, a part of old Europe whose existence we are not aware of and do not even know that we are not aware of. Perhaps it ...”

“... To Christopher Isherwood I One among friends who stood above your grave I cast a clod of earth from those heaped there Down on the great brass-handled coffin lid. It rattled on the oak like a door knocker. And at that sound I saw your face beneath Wedged in an oblong shadow under ground: Flesh creased, eyes shut, jaw jutting, And on the mouth a smile: triumph of one Who has escaped from lifelong colleagues roaring For him to join their throng ...”

“... this country, though an unfamiliar name to most readers of verse in America. The other, Nicholas Christopher, is one of the most celebrated of America’s younger poets but – I suspect – an unknown figure in England, at least as a poet (his novel, The Soloist, was published by Pan last year). In each case, this disparity in reputation – this ...”

“... In January 1936 when George V was dying, Lord Dawson, his physician, wrote on the back of a menu card: ‘The King’s life is moving peacefully towards its close.’ This message was broadcast to the world by the infant BBC. Shortly afterwards Neville Chamberlain wrote that Dawson had touched the hearts of millions all over the world. In the last fifty years the media, trading in the human-interest story, have been the beauticians of the medical profession ...”

“... of light’ (‘The Rosy-fingered’), and ‘I cannot stammer thunder in your sky / Or flash white phrases there’ (‘Fiat’). Stilted grandiloquence and mythic gestures abound. Syntax is often contorted, and the main point of many of the poems seems largely to outdo ‘The Extasie’ in argumentative knottiness. This strenuous manner survives through ...”

“... the new route. Nor would the planners have far to look on the South Bank for a site to clear, a white elephant to demolish, and a station name to trip off the lips. County Hall has just fallen vacant. In twenty years, Frenchmen could be booking tickets to London Livingstone, and paying through the nose in the dining-car for a taste of spatchcocked ...”

“... to him. Newton’s annus mirabilis, 1665-6, in which he discovered the calculus, the nature of white light and the theory of gravity, was spent at her house; the apple fell in her garden. Manuel’s theory, put forward with judicious tentativeness, is that Isaac’s early separation from his mother left a wound that never healed. This accounts for his ...”

“... else.’ Similar insights arise from the footage itself, which consists of moody black and white shots of a man and a woman in a not quite recognisable city. Its compulsive appeal never quite comes across but we’re told that the experience of watching it is ‘profoundly liminal’. What’s more, ‘the footage has a way of cutting across ...”

“... On inauguration​ day in January, the 45th president-elect of the United States arrived at the White House in a cavalcade of black cars, stepped from his armoured limousine, strode up the stairs, and greeted Barack and Michelle Obama with a handshake and air kisses. Melania Trump caught up with her husband moments later, an unwieldy Tiffany-blue gift box in her gloved hands ...”

“... common with other peoples around the world, many Japanese assume a hierarchy of foreignness, with white Westerners near the top. Last year, an ‘Africa Hometown Initiative’, intended to establish educational and cultural exchange between four Japanese municipalities and four African countries (Nigeria, Ghana, Tanzania and Mozambique), had to be cancelled ...”

“... entry into the war in Europe was that the British should give up their empire. In consequence, as Christopher Hitchens has pointed out in his matchless Blood, Class and Nostalgia (1990), the British underwent a massive and soul-gelding relegation. Harold Macmillan’s remark that ‘these Americans represent the new Roman Empire and we Britons, like the ...”

“... kind of job and are bound to get to the real boss, ten to one you are brought up against a little white-faced Jew in a bath-chair with an eye like a rattlesnake. Yes, sir, he is the man who is ruling the world just now.’Hannay is sceptical about the ‘Jew-anarchists’ but notes that his neighbour’s tales of international financiers stirring up chaos for ...”

“... archivist called Faruk Darvinoglu, returns as the ‘editor’ of Pamuk’s third novel, The White Castle (Beyaz Kale, 1985), his first to be translated into English – in 1990, very readably, by Victoria Holbrook. The White Castle takes the form of a manuscript that Faruk has uncovered and rewritten in contemporary ...”

“... at Manhattan’s Playboy Club, where she was kitted out in a satin leotard with cantilevered bra, white cuffs, bow tie, three-inch heels, rabbit ears and a fluffy tail. She was ‘programmed like an IBM computer’ to uphold the ‘Playboy image’, which was inculcated by a ‘Bunny Mother’ and set down by Hefner’s brother in the Bunny Manual. The bible ...”