“... year, garnered respectful reviews; she shone at public readings; she bantered with Wallace Stevens and Vladimir Nabokov at parties; when she continued her studies at Oxford, she was funded by a blessed ‘St Gugg’ fellowship. While in England she made influential friends such as Donald Hall and the Plath-Hugheses, and published in the New ...”

“... Politicians who would not otherwise be interested in a pilgrimage to rural Scotland revere it as a mark of having arrived in other places that matter. The newly elected leader of the Conservative Party, Liz Truss, travelled to Balmoral on 6 September 2022 to be officially appointed prime minister, the 15th that the 96-year-old queen had appointed in her ...”

“... that of thousands of others. The first film we see by any major director usually makes a mark, but we don’t always feel we have seen Saturn swallowing his sons.The first Buñuel film seen by most people of my generation who were not film-club addicts was probably Viridiana (1961). After two Surrealist films made in France (Un Chien andalou and ...”

“... citing ‘systemic’ failings, with tens of thousands of crimes going unrecorded each year. Mark Rowley, the Met commissioner – the force’s most senior officer, appointed last summer after Cressida Dick was pressured by politicians into resigning – has vowed to ‘lead the renewal of policing by consent, which has been so heavily dented in recent ...”

“... pause, and the tone and air with which he answered, “It is a haggard existence!”’ Mark Storey, Southey’s most recent biographer, gently describes him as ‘less than completely stable’, and his poetry is a product of his genius for repression, as the handsome and welcome new edition of the verse lets us see with new clarity. No one in the ...”

“... in Ireland, France and Russia, he did not give thought to the folk life of black Americans,’ Mark Helbling argued in an essay in Phylon (1979). ‘This was a striking omission, one that Alain Locke was quick to correct.’By and large the writers of the Harlem Renaissance did not experiment in the manner of Pound, Eliot and ...”

“... of Holy Life. A ‘character’ is a sketch of an ideal type. Herbert describes the book as ‘a mark to aim at: which also I will set as high as I can, since he shoots higher that threatens the moon than he that aims at a tree.’ Its 37 chapters outline the skills he wanted his parson to possess: how to catechise, how to preach, how to keep his house, how ...”

“... to extend the promise of redemption to people of colour, seeing in them the curse of Ham and mark of Cain. Wheatley reminds them: ‘Remember, Christians, Negros, black as Cain,/May be refin’d, and join th’ angelic train.’ Rhyming Cain’s sin with the angel’s glory, Wheatley promises an alchemical transformation of those who are elevated by ...”

“... undercover CIA facility in Benghazi, which resulted in the death of the US ambassador, Christopher Stevens, and three others. The report’s criticism of the State Department for not providing adequate security at the consulate, and of the intelligence community for not alerting the US military to the presence of a CIA outpost in the area, received front-page ...”

“... between the way you’re shod and the way you talk and who you are: that a brogue is an under-ear mark of identity, a sign of tribal belonging and origin; it is the way you say the words in the country of words that you come from. It could be synonymous with ‘mother tongue’ except that it doesn’t assume that affiliation runs through blood or the female ...”

“... than sterile dilettante, officious critic and connoisseur (‘here you miss/Or there exceed the mark’). As such, the character clearly influenced a second writer, earlier than Thurber and much more distinguished. The Duke of Ferrara surely fathered Gilbert Osmond, Henry James’s lethal dilettante in The Portrait of a Lady: a man who at first represents ...”

“... Frank Kermode. His range was astonishing, across genres and languages, and some favourites (Donne, Stevens, Roth) were very vivid in his memory right up to the end. He gracefully concealed his shock at the extent of my unreading, part of a deep courtesy that somehow enabled rather than obstructed playfulness and teasing. We would chat about the current review ...”

“... times its deal-table plainness and verve, no matter how recondite his preoccupations. Like Wallace Stevens, Jones believed that the greatest poverty is not to live in a physical world. He had briefly thought of becoming a monk after the war, before embracing a native this-worldiness which counterpointed the long views of his spirituality, just as it enlivened ...”

“... It is as though heat had been applied to the language (calefaction?), and made – in Mark Rudman’s phrase – ‘fused images’. Lines from Lowell’s Leopardi suggest themselves by way of confirmation: ‘I could forget/the fascinating studies in my bolted room,/where my life was burning out,/and the heat/of my writings made the letters ...”