“... 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 ...”

“... on each of these days 20,000 people were unable to receive their scheduled supply. According to John Ging, the director of UNRWA in Gaza, most of the people who get food aid are entirely dependent on it. On 18 December UNRWA suspended all food distribution for both emergency and regular programmes because of the blockade. The WFP has had similar ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... in recognition of graces granted’, begins as a journey through the underworld – from south to north, or from the Left Bank to the Right Bank, on the Nord-Sud metro line (now Ligne 12):            I want a holophrase                        NORD-SUD                        ZIG-ZAG                        LION NOIR ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... be assumed that Iran could make weapons small enough to fit into missiles without testing: the dud North Korean test shows that even with testing success cannot be taken for granted. A diplomatic solution is available, but the US and its EU allies do not want to consider it. It is the same deal I have mentioned in these pages before,* whereby Iran would be ...”

“... of brown sea, dancing, like water in the window of a half-full kettle at boiling point.The great North Sea storm of 2013 came sixty years after the great North Sea storm of 1953. In Lincolnshire, nobody was killed, against 41 in 1953. Then, the storm was seen as one of those natural disasters that comes along every century ...”

“... war broke out, Cantos 52 to 71, known to initiates as the Chinese History Cantos followed by the John Adams Cantos, seem to him as to many of us wrongly conceived as well as sloppily executed. His dislike of them takes a special turn, however, when for the failure of the Adams sequence he blames John Adams, not ...”

“... merely inside my veins, but as if all the air in the room was suddenly blowing with the coldest of north winds. The slithering, sucking, mucilaginous noise grew closer and louder and then as it came to the door there was a pause. The silence lasted for a few seconds. I hoped that the creature’s strength had failed. Then I heard its crying hiss, louder than ...”

“... does facilitate imaginative density, even in the more Fenian parts of Heaney’s Wintering Out and North, because a linguistic heterogeneity takes poetic thinking around more corners, draws more angles of life together. A Boland supporter might object that Heaney can afford to be confidently inclusive, and to stud poems like ‘A New Song’ with Anglo-Norman ...”

“... wall in King’s Cross Station. Anna’s father reckoned that the Hadmans were related to the poet John Clare, who came from Helpston, a village near their own. Our investigation drew many previously unknown Hadmans from the ground where they had lain, undisturbed, for hundreds of years. They were known to each other, some of them, but unknown to us: lives ...”