“... distinction between fiction and lies seems more or less self-evident now. In the words of Bernard Williams, a lie is ‘an assertion, the content of which the speaker believes to be false, which is made with the intention to deceive the hearer with regard to that content’. That makes it relatively easy to distinguish between fiction and lies: a ...”

“... response. Whether the occasion was the death of Dylan Thomas or the 85th birthday of Vaughan Williams, the Campaign for Nuclear Disarmament or the opening of Queen Elizabeth Hall, Day-Lewis obliged with an appropriate verse. These public poems are not very good: Day-Lewis was not by nature a rhetorician, and his public ...”

“... to a roomful of creative writing students, something on the lines of ‘We’ve been reading Elizabeth Bowen, now think of a house where you were happy, but you no longer live there. Write it!’, they all bent their heads down over their paper and began writing. I couldn’t believe it. When students are tackling a task like that, you can feel the whirr ...”

“... sense that Jarrell made his mark. Or perhaps it was the wit that devastated. Of William Carlos Williams he said that ‘even his good critical remarks sound as if they had been made by Henry Ford’; of Edith Sitwell’s then fashionable poems that they ‘sound as if Madame Blavatsky had written them for a Society of Latterday Druids’. In a sonnet ...”

“... his deepest feelings – for his rather alarming mother, for his American substitute mother Elizabeth Mayer, for his lover Pears – find gauche or commonplace expression. And a great many letters are, not surprisingly but also not thrillingly, about musical business, engagements, fees, commissions, permissions. Along the way, they do provide incidental ...”

“... before is interesting, and allies McCarthy with all sorts of other writers and critics – Raymond Williams, Doris Lessing and (perhaps most suggestively) Iris Murdoch – who were all talking about something similar at the same time. You can describe it in many different ways, but it comes down to the disintegration of the representative function of ...”

“... result – a horse-drawn harvester set off against a silver sea – over half a page. Clough Williams-Ellis stretched Tyneham’s view of Worbarrow Bay over the end-papers of his passionately-argued conservationist volume Britain and the Beast. There could scarcely have been a more evocative picture of an England that, in the Thirties, was endangered but ...”

“... incongruous inner ring of like-minded persons, including Tolkien, a Catholic convert, and Charles Williams, a Cockney original with a decidedly creepy inner life, and an extraordinary talent for updating the mystico-religious poetic attitudes of the Fin-de-Siècle. Thus was born the Inklings, an unexclusive but very characteristic group of like-minded ...”

“... distant from almost everyone else, despite himself, until he was in his thirties. As a student at Williams College, he discovered a facility for writing and public speaking; he also developed mysterious back pains that he later attributed to his relationship with his mother, and an interest in psychology prompted by the ‘suggestive therapeutics’ he used ...”

“... used to criminalise young black men. In a study published in 2016, the criminologists Patrick Williams and Becky Clarke wrote that while only a fraction of ‘serious youth violence’ offences in London and Manchester were committed by black people (27 per cent and 6 per cent respectively), most of those on the gang matrices in both cities were black (72 ...”

“... read this one by Mariani, a serial biographer of poets (he has notched already, among Americans, Williams, Crane, Lowell and Berryman), I don’t feel much the better for it. I got more, qua biography, from the bare bones of the 11-page chronology in the Library of America edition of Stevens; or from the brisk 15-page sketch called ‘Wallace Stevens: A ...”

“... the BBC for nearly forty years and can still be heard in the archives introducing young Princess Elizabeth as she delivers her wartime address to the children of Britain. ‘Goodnight children, everywhere,’ was Uncle Mac’s catchprase. Though Gamlin’s activities were under wraps until now, there have long been rumours about McCulloch. He was given the ...”

“... three children, it was the only one who was immune to these emotions who inherited the throne. Elizabeth of Bohemia could well have become the focus for some of the aspirations centred on Prince Henry, yet Charles could not. How far Charles, like Harold Wilson, was handicapped by a ‘lost leader’ myth around him is a question to which the answer is not ...”

“... voice) no different from when I first met him twenty-five years ago. Dame Judi is here and Michael Williams, Dame Wendy, Lindsay A., Ron Pickup and Anna Massey, Keith Baxter, Percy Harris, who’s 90 herself, and Ralph Richardson’s widow, Mu. I am happily seated between Jocelyn Herbert and Merula Guinness, with both of whom one can be happily silly. ‘You ...”

“... seems to have had some sympathy with the more moderate forms of worship advocated by Bishop John Williams. Herrick could play with the language of Catholic worship, satirise Puritans who used long hair to hide ears that had been cropped as a punishment for their writings, and criticise kings who extorted money from their subjects. He was not simply drawn ...”