“... But when one considers the involving moral and imaginative power of the whole, the remark seems a gross understatement; it seems to miss, even, things about the poem of specific interest to a biographer, concerning Eliot’s evolving moral consciousness in the years of his first marriage. I am not proposing a simple ‘biographical’ reading of this or any ...”

“... Oddingley Grange on Trench Lane, whose châtelaine was a Mrs White, aunt of Lieutenant-Colonel Philip Robinson, commanding officer of the Royal Artillery 67th Field Regiment, Territorial Army. Lt Col Robinson approved, and a gruff handshake transformed my father into a second lieutenant, though he had to serve his time as a failed schoolteacher until June ...”

“... it. They all did. Ted Hughes had a reputation by the end of the 1950s. So, too, did Thom Gunn, Philip Larkin. There was nobody new worth nurturing apart from the people we published in the early 1960s.Was Plath already out?Plath died in 1963, a year after the first issue of the Review; and we devoted a whole issue to her final poems and would certainly ...”

“... owed his international reputation to the two great volumes on the Mediterranean in the age of Philip II which he published in 1949, and to his trilogy on the material civilisation of world capitalism, which appeared between 1967 and 1979. He died a few months before the first volumes of his incomplete final work came out in 1986. More local in topic, and ...”

“... to 25 per cent). FOBTs currently account for more than £1.5 billion of the betting industry’s gross annual profit: serious money. The average weekly take from each individual terminal is more than £900, which isn’t bad given that they are almost costless to run (no extra staff are needed: you just plug in the machines and away you go). Research ...”

“... Prosecution Service put the figure at about ten a year. All such figures can be assumed to be gross underestimates. In January 2008, Commander Steve Allen, giving evidence in the House of Commons on behalf of the Association of Chief Police Officers, put the annual figure of forced marriages and honour killings in the UK at around five hundred (an article ...”

“... of police malpractice. But now Lane, the country’s senior judge, was admitting that a gross wrong had been perpetrated; and he was saying that the policemen responsible should be punished. With Denning’s appalling vista now wide open, there were renewed demands for a fresh look at other contentious convictions. The Guildford Four’s release was ...”

“... But what can you say about your own life to someone on the brink of theirs? I didn’t cry when Philip died either. I’d seen him shrivel into a brown husk, the taut dry skin stretched over his skeleton like a mummified body excavated from some desert tomb. I’d seen him in his wheelchair with an oxygen mask clamped to his face, his eyes rotating ...”

“... half-starved, white-haired and decrepit at the age of 34 – from chronic menstrual flux and the gross abuse of her jailers – the no-good Autrichienne became quite staggeringly noble in her final moments. David’s harrowing sketch of her, set down from life as she rolled by in the death-cart on her way to execution, is the unexpected emblem of a ...”