“... editors such as Kingsley Martin and Cyril Connolly, the editors of famous papers such as Michael Foot at the Evening Standard, the great publishers of the day, have all of them left their mark on the cultural history of the time. Their opposite numbers on radio remain to this day largely unknown, or, like Orwell, famous for other reasons. This ignorance has ...”

“... means ‘spleen’), and a group of trainee doctors in white smocks. Examining the chart at the foot of my bed, Milza would ask me: ‘And how is our Englishman today?’ Questions designed to gauge my mental alertness met with little success. In English I was asked: ‘Do you know why you’re here?’ I was in two minds about that. ‘I fell – or else I ...”

“... into the Trans-Sahara Counterterrorism Partnership – more than $1 billion since 2005 – or foot the bill for Operation Enduring Freedom Trans-Sahara, if at the end of it all al-Qaida is allowed to march on Bamako? Why would Obama order more drone strikes than his predecessor against the leaders of Somalia’s al-Shabaab, a group with relatively weak ...”

“... to the defence of the threatened mainstream, which sounds a bit like a call to defend Elton John or MTV. Either Paterson’s mainstream poets were not as middle of the road as his name for them suggested, or the threat levels were being artificially hiked up. The Iraq invasion was taking place at the time and angry avant-gardists quickly drew the ...”

“... and physical ties on the other. Or the Clint Eastwood of The Outlaw Josey Wales versus the John Wayne of The Searchers. Jimmy Carter and Michael Foot versus Reagan and Thatcher, say. In the end: the difference between the idealistic left and the libertarian right. Somewhere between, possibly, lies freedom that ...”

“... lorries stream in and out every day, along with the hordes of cars and caravans and passengers on foot transported on P&O ferries to and from Calais. The Port of Dover is the UK’s closest point of connection to the continent beyond, just 21 miles away: £122 billion in imports and exports pass through here every year. Big container ships, heading north or ...”

“... Surrounded by poets – Giuseppe Ungaretti, Allen Ginsberg, Ingeborg Bachmann, Rafael Alberti, John Berryman, Charles Tomlinson, Stephen Spender – we felt en famille. Paz and I and our wives drove to Assisi to see Giotto’s frescos, wandered about the Chiostro dei Morti, and climbed to the Eremo delle Carceri, home to Saint Francis’s stone ...”

“... The​ vast majority of those who worked in service never set foot in a stately home. The country house, with its uniformed staff and rigid hierarchy, looms large in the British imagination, but the experience of service in the late 19th and early 20th centuries was far more mundane and far more various. Most servant-keeping households employed only a cook and a maid or a single maid-of-all-work or ‘general ...”

“... hell itself, filled with writhing beasts that rend at one another as fires destroy the earth. In John Martin’s The Country of The Iguanodon (1837), a group of dragon-like reptiles slither and bite; in A. Demarly’s apocalyptic Eruptions of Poisonous Hot Springs in the Triassic Period (1883) a geyser of toxic gas spurts from a volcanic vent, while dead ...”

“... Panther party militant and the festival along with it: ‘I think this is a pile of shit while John Sinclair rots in prison.’ (Like Hoffman, Pete Townshend went off-message from ‘the spirit of Woodstock’ at that point. ‘Fuck off!’ he announced. ‘Fuck off my fucking stage!’) But Lang never imagined the festival as a political event and it ...”

“... instruction book, known as the ‘Bible’, 750 pages long, weighing four pounds. In 1999, John Reckert, a senior executive of Burger King, explained at a conference the relationship between technology and employees. ‘We can develop equipment that only works one way,’ he said. ‘There are many different ways today that employees can abuse our ...”

“... i.e. paying them to leave. That’s probably the best one can say for Britain’s foot-dragging. It was the way to get shot of what James Callaghan called this ‘poisoned chalice’ with least fuss. It depended, however, on Argentina’s patience. In 1982 that finally snapped. Confused, perhaps, by the FCO’s subtle diplomacy; sharing the ...”

“... gates. Is my passport the right way up? Are my feet exactly on the yellow sticky-backed plastic foot shapes on the floor, and does it matter? Is my nose really that big? Finally there’s the barely concealed relief when my features, contorted by anxiety, defeat the AI facial recognition system, and I have to go and smile at AN ACTUAL PERSON (am I allowed ...”

“... flock of pigeons in Washington Square. He knows the birds by name: Big Bosom, Lady Astor, St John the Baptist, Polly Adler, Fiorello. He wanders from saloon to saloon cadging beers, sandwiches and cash. Most important, he adds to his work-in-progress, a mysterious book that he calls ‘The Oral History of Our Time’. This massive, encompassing volume, a ...”

“... and informative. Trained to think in terms of the physics of gyroscopes, pulleys, pumps, calf’s-foot jelly or rubber bands, they extended this behaviour to Creation. Their critics, like the waspish French scientist Pierre Duhem, thought this mechanical obsession was a typically British weakness: ‘we thought we were entering the tranquil and neatly ordered ...”