“... a particular taste for Mahler and for the Elizabethan composer John Dowland). In 1947 the awkward young man with literary ambitions moved into a flat with other young littérateurs, including the future avant-garde poets Jack Spicer and Robert Duncan. He also took a job in a record ...”

“... voluptuous rebirth.’ There aren’t many skeletons left in Hardwick’s closet. Since 1973, when Robert Lowell published The Dolphin, a series of sonnets based on Hardwick’s letters to him during the breakdown of their marriage, the story of her life has been bound up with, and contorted by, his overbearing presence. Cathy Curtis, author of the first ...”

“... the uncertain Irishness of certain writers. Was Sterne Irish? Was Oliver Goldsmith Irish? Was Robert Tressell Irish? Is Iris Murdoch Irish? But the argument about who was gay and who was not and how we know is more difficult. How can someone be gay if, as in the case of Gogol, there is no direct evidence? Yet if you trawl through Gogol’s stories with ...”

“... selling off much of it – houses, land, family heirlooms. There are death duties; he has five young daughters and a marriage that’s going to end soon. He needs cash.Howard is knowledgeable about art. He’s a serious connoisseur and collector, an expert on Wenceslaus Hollar, the prolific 17th-century Bohemian printmaker. Among his inheritance is the ...”

“... if there is a vote for UK withdrawal from Europe, support for Scottish independence could surge. Robert Crawford The Scottish Referendum​ of 2014 is a watershed in the history of Britain. The Union of 1707 as we have known it is no more, even if some kind of union between England and Scotland continues. Scots have been ‘promised’ more powers for the ...”

“... elements on both sides of the Channel have delighted in dressing up in military relics. Young men who wore spectacles to avoid conscription by Napoleon were quick to adopt martial styles when the risk was over. Many of us remember how the dishonouring of uniforms was advanced to an art form in the King’s Road. Tirelessly, Chenoune identifies the ...”

“... with gold and silver crosses, by soldiers of a British expeditionary force in 1868, after Sir Robert Napier’s defeat of King Tewodros, who had spent many years collecting them. They are now in the possession of the British Library and the Queen, among others, and there are no plans to return them. Lalibela was named after a man born in the 12th century ...”

“... from Sotteville-lès-Rouen or Palavas-les-Flots. Droves of admiring postgraduates, like so many Young Raleighs, set out to comb obscure archives, and on their return delivered their reports from the front at Cobb’s Oxford seminar. The way to Richard’s heart would have been for one of us to work on his beloved Lille-Roubaix, whose Revolutionary archives ...”

“... a premium for the privilege of working for it. Huntington was an honourable exception. He paid his young aspirants 25 shillings a week, for which he worked us hard but gave us a thorough grounding in all aspects of the business: a grounding which is no longer possible, so far, at least, as the larger and more rigidly departmentalised firms are concerned. After ...”

“... might be taken for an English colony. The fortress and town of Kronstadt, which protected the young St Petersburg from Swedish attack, are usually thought to have been founded a year after the city itself, in 1704. It is safe to assume that no installation of comparable strategic significance in Britain has ever been taken for a Russian colony. In an ...”

“... of the Palestinian right of return.For a growing number of Americans on the left, especially young people, Israel is seen not as a democracy but as a brutal and racist ethnocracy. Radicalised by the Black Lives Matter movement, and sensitive to questions of racial privilege, white supremacy and state violence, they find it impossible to defend a state ...”

“... trip. Perhaps it was always unlikely that someone whose models were Hölderlin, Mallarmé, Tzara, Robert Walser and Gottfried Benn would win prizes, honours or even a sizeable readership in Britain or the US. And his poetry has a prickliness about it, as did the poet: a quality of neither asking nor needing to be liked. In any event he would have been pleased ...”

“... universities, infiltrated the ranks of the professoriat and proceeded to poison the minds of the young. The academy was overrun by these ‘tenured radicals’ (as Roger Kimball put it in his 1990 book), engaged in the promulgation of an ‘illiberal education’ (Dinesh D’Souza in 1991), dedicated to ‘the closing of the American mind’ (Allan Bloom in ...”

“... 1931, or that Dudley Carew’s memoir, The House Is Gone, was published in 1949 by the firm of Robert Hale? Who is Dudley Carew anyway, and where does Taylor lay his hands on these remarkably recondite texts? Why should one begin a paragraph with the sentence, ‘After publishing his first novel, A Day in Summer (1963), J.L. Carr gave up his job as a ...”

“... making their inspections, they kept an eye out for possible candidates. ‘I have espied one young fole at Croland which in myne opinion shal be muche mor pleasant than ever Sexton was in eny parte,’ Thomas Bedyll reported from Crowland Abbey in Lincolnshire. ‘He is not past XV yers old.’The most famous fool of the Tudor era seems to have arrived ...”