“... father was a printer’s overseer for a Nonconformist weekly on Fleet Street, from a line of North Wales plasterers and stonemasons. His mother’s family were pure Rotherhithe: boatbuilders and shipwrights, her father a mast-and-block maker competent ‘in all that belongs to a ship’s carpentry’. Starting out as a teacher and governess, Alice Jones ...”

“... time, and its chief spent his evenings discussing Armageddon theology with strangers. Oliver North recruited convicted narcotics smugglers to run the secret war against Nicaragua. George Bush recruited Manuel Noriega to the CIA. As the Watergate hounds closed in, Henry Kissinger was implored to sink to his Jewish knees and join Richard Nixon in prayer on ...”

“... through anxiety and depression. Most mornings, the car that took him from his home in St John’s Wood to the Observer offices near Fleet Street would divert to Sigmund Freud’s old house in Maresfield Gardens, Hampstead, where Freud’s daughter Anna still saw patients. There, Astor would spend a daily analytic hour on the couch attempting to ...”

“... Brown was one of the convenor/editors of the Red Paper for Scotland in the early Seventies, and John Lloyd saw the inside of the Communist Party before helping to found a pro-European Marxist tendency at about the same time. Rather touchingly, he uses the chorus of the ‘Internationale’ to supply the chapter headings of his ‘CounterBlast’, which is ...”

“... governor who won the Iowa caucuses in 2008. Huckabee believes ‘that there’s more freedom in North Korea sometimes than there is in the United States,’ because ‘Christian convictions are under attack as never before … We are moving rapidly towards the criminalisation of Christianity.’ He has noted that ‘in the world I come from and choose to ...”

“... boosterism in a single press release. The new plant was ‘testament to the skilled workers of the North-East’, it would put Britain ‘at the helm’ of the ‘global green industrial revolution’, it would ‘level up’ the ‘industrial heartlands’. It was ‘a major boost’ and ‘a resounding vote of confidence’. It would ‘unlock ...”

“... of Bishop’s poems survived. She conjured up what Robert Lowell in 1947, in his review of her North – South, called ‘something in motion, weary but persisting’, and then moved to something exact and specific, something human and fragile, what Lowell identified as ‘rest, sleep, fulfilment or death’. She delighted in the exotic, in the ...”

“... Here they come, marching north out of Spitalfields, stride for stride in hallucinatory ordinariness, the celebrated living sculptures, Gilbert and George. It’s an English spring afternoon and they have dressed for it in country formal outfits: stout boots, long, brown chequerboard coats with too many buttons, furry headwarmers that flap down over their ears ...”

“... in San Francisco. Learn to whistle at five’ – before moving on to bigger things: ‘“North of Boston”. Address Great Poetry Meal. Decline. Later works. Doesn’t seem to die. Attempt to write “Crossing the Bar”. International copyright. Chief occupation (according to Who’s Who) pursuit of glory; most noticeable trait, patience in the ...”

“... the birth of mass culture as folk culture in the United States. Films produce stars at a distance, John Fiske has written, whereas television creates personalities. The glamour of stars sets them apart from and above their fans; the familiarity of personalities offers a more intimate, equal relationship. Well before television, on radio and in talking ...”

“... makes clear, Ginsberg’s influence within California is largely confined to San Francisco and the north. To the south, and in Los Angeles, the dominant figure is Charles Bukowski. Bukowski has spent the last 35 years giving expression to the experience of the American down-and-out. Typically his poems take place in a bar, or a bedsit, or at a ...”

“... written in the first person, in the present tense. Its heroine, ‘Jane Feaver’, is born in the North of England, one of four children of a ‘critic’ and a mother who goes on to take a degree in English and become an admired poet. Her parents split up; both eventually remarry. ‘Jane’, like the real Jane, grows up in Brixton, goes to Oxford, and later ...”

“... of Obama’s presidency – the Libya war and its endless aftermath: the flow of refugees from North Africa; the weapons pipeline to Syria; the rise of Isis in Iraq and Syria and now inside Libya – was a catastrophe designed and supervised by Clinton. As late as November, she had the temerity to boast that ‘Libya was smart power at its best’; and ...”

“... its traumatic aftermath, moving inch by inch towards the horror at the centre of the story. John Bartle – Bart – is an infantryman from Virginia serving in the Sunni triangle at the height of the Iraqi insurgency: ‘Al Tafar’ stands in for Tal Afar, where Powers was a machine-gunner with an engineering unit (‘Up ...”

“... stand over the flame when at rest, always terrifying it with his staff. In 1661, in Fumifugium, John Evelyn wrote that coal smoke had transformed London into ‘the suburbs of Hell’. Forty years later, Timothy Nourse noted that acid in the smoke was causing London’s oldest buildings to be ‘peel’d and fley’d as I may say to the very Bones by this ...”