“... He is a reporter who became a full-time writer of books: Homicide (1991) and, with Ed Burns, The Corner (1997), both of which were turned into successful TV series. Both concern drugs and death in Baltimore; Simon has said that ‘what drugs have not destroyed, the war on them has.’ The Wire is different, though: more ambitious, more grounded, more ...”

“... and in 1963 he went back, this time on a Fulbright scholarship and with a new lover, the artist Paul Thek. Hujar was already making a name for himself, but his time in Palermo, where he photographed mummified friars and citizens in the Capuchin catacombs, seems to have enlivened his art from then on. The session lasted only about twenty minutes, but in ...”

“... in Russia on a visit arranged by the Great Britain-USSR Society. My colleagues were the novelists Paul Bailey, Christopher Hope and Timothy Mo (who also writes for Boxing News), the poet Craig Raine (who doesn’t) and the playwright Sue Townsend of Adrian Mole fame. I had many misgivings about the trip, particularly in regard to creature comforts. I ...”

“... own letters to Zukofsky for useful bits. Zukofsky married Celia Thaew in 1939 and they had a son, Paul, in 1943. This didn’t put a damper on Niedecker and Zukofsky’s correspondence; Paul’s development became a source of fascination for Niedecker, resulting in an important sequence entitled ‘For ...”

“... programme. She had had a copy of William Carlos Williams’s In the American Grain at the corner of her desk, which she had bought so she’d have something to read on the long subway ride to and from work. The couple had a son, Paul, in 1943, a musical prodigy and now a well-known violinist and conductor. Over the ...”

“... been reissued recently by Penguin, in hardback and with new introductions. It follows the hapless Paul Pennyfeather, who, expelled from Oxford for a misdemeanour he did not commit, wanders through an unsuccessful career as a schoolmaster before becoming engaged to the grand and wealthy Margot Beste-Chetwynde. As it happens, her riches derive principally from ...”

“... in Vichy France. In the Belgian case, Hitler ignored the request for an armistice on the part of Paul-Henri Spaak and other ministers who had taken refuge in France on 18 June 1940. (Curiously, Conway doesn’t mention this proposal, which no one in Belgium likes to remember.) Even so, Belgium was ruled by what was usually the least abusive type of ...”

“... and tried to get John Dee to put him in touch with the heavenly orders. True, there had been Pope Paul III, a politician if ever there was one and founder of the Counter-Reformation: he retained an astrologer to tell him, I suppose, when it was prudent to launch the Society of Jesus or set up the Roman Inquisition (which was to persecute astrologers). Since ...”

“... mood-changer. Here are two examples, one English and one American, both extremely accomplished. Paul Bailey, with several distinguished novels to his credit already, is a master of this mode. The action of Old Soldiers, the Aristotelian space from the beginning through the middle to the end, occupies only a couple of weeks (and 120 thinly printed ...”

“... university early to get married, had my first child and then realised I had backed myself into a corner. One night, sick of watching my husband and his friends play pool, I challenged them to a game. I beat them all, one after another. A friend took me to a local snooker club. The green baize stretched away under the hanging lamps like the pitch at ...”

“... dog. Here is Lucian Freud (1997) looking earnestly off-stage, sitting just inside the lower right corner of a photograph dominated by the rear view of the big canvas behind him. This invisible painting is set on an easel that seems to frame and crown the painter’s head; and we see an artist conversing politely while inwardly seized by a looming work in ...”

“... makes one think of France. The splendid conception of the Hayward exhibition, and the design by Paul Williams, remind one continually that the musée imaginaire need not be imaginary – in fact, cannot be. The content, the senses and perceptions of the art it brings together, are about exactly those values that we can only hold before the eye and in the ...”

“... a fine old colonial city which seemed to have a crumbling convent or modest palace on almost every corner. It went through a bad patch in the early years of this century, even before narcoviolence made life difficult there as in so many parts of Mexico. But the city cleaned up its streets, activated the tourist trade, and thanks to much skilled restoration now ...”

“... the knotted string from which the artist’s hands struggle to escape is the punitive opposite of Paul Klee’s bouncy, cheerful ‘taking a line for a walk’. In Hand Lead Fulcrum the artist’s arm drops slowly down off the horizontal, neatly allegorising the weight of pigment, while also articulating the physical labour of the drafting hand. The two pairs ...”

“... been harassed by the African children chanting Oyinbo! – which means, roughly, ‘Paleface!’ Paul Levy’s experience, recorded in Finger Lickin’ Good, is not wholly dissimilar. He is food correspondent for the Observer and has written scholarly books about Bloomsbury people: we might suppose him to be British-born, but he was raised in Kentucky, the ...”