“... out that both she and Harris had started their careers as lawyers representing children and young women who were victims of sexual abuse. The point was driven home by the stories of Hadley Duvall, a Kentucky woman who testified to being raped by her stepfather, and Wanda Kagan, a high-school friend of Harris’s who was taken in by Harris’s family ...”

“... suddenly they are made to join the daily grind of 21st-century pedagogy. As the parent of young children, I wasn’t alone in feeling perturbed by the relentlessness of the daily maths and literacy classes, and by the rote manner in which English – or literacy, rather – is taught, with sentences treated like exotic gadgets to be operated with the ...”

“... for his powerful distrust of authority. Ackroyd rummages dutifully for further evidence. Was young Alfred beaten at school by a ‘black-robed Jesuit’? Or caught out in the open when the Zeppelins raided London in 1915? Did he read too much Edgar Allan Poe? It doesn’t really add up to very much. And yet – or therefore – the strong conviction ...”

“... early, so that by 12.45 I’m back home. It’s a model service, today’s radiographer a bearded young man who asks about Allelujah!, and shows me the screen and how he measures the width of my (quite small) aneurysms. Good young medics always cheer me and offer hope, not for my future but for the world in general.19 ...”

“... radical Liberalism, and many of its founders’ lives reflected the eclecticism of that old cause. Gavin Brown Clark ran away from his bourgeois Glasgow home at thirteen, living in India, Australia and London before working as a surgeon in Edinburgh; by the 1880s, this ‘inveterate joiner of organisations’ had become dedicated to temperance, land reform and ...”

“... even Mandy the Temp, in her anachronistically fab gear, seems to be trying to catch the eye of Gavin Stamp). An increasingly silly catalogue of deaths and suicides announces the final surrender of the Golden Age Murder Mystery: Agatha Christie force-fed on Pevsner and the humbug of Kenneth Baker’s latest flag-waving anthology. A sub-genre that has always ...”

“... Council is busy and full of students who only leave when it closes at 8 p.m., and seeing these young Italians reading English books and magazines, watching videos and generally finding this a worthwhile place to be is immensely heartening. The British Council can still be thought a bit of a joke but like the World Service it’s a more useful investment of ...”

“... department wasn’t idle: in a recent essay in the Times, Douglas Murray, a director of Toby Young’s Free Speech Union, took as a sign of our putative crisis over free speech the difficulty someone who opposes a net zero emissions goal has in becoming a university vice chancellor. As Lord Wallace of Saltaire remarked in the Lords debate on the higher ...”

“... is explicit sympathy for the old dying alone, for exploited husbands and overworked wives, for the young with their fragile illusions: but it is all cold comfort. ‘They’ are marched up and down their streets without much sensitivity, either imaginative or metrical; the flat caps are matched by a flat-footed rhymeless pentameter. Dunn reproaches himself in ...”

“... lack of grammar and inconsequence’ – comments unlikely to endear him to the angry young men of the time. The Modernists, in the ascendant after his death, took their revenge. In no sense a Pioneer of Modern Design, Lutyens was pointedly ignored in Pevsner’s teleological tale, An Outline of European Architecture. ‘Our greatest architect ...”

“... turned and made appear /Her neck refulgent’. He greatly preferred the 16th-century Scots of Gavin Douglas: ‘Her nek schane like unto the rois in May.’ The rose in Virgil’s ‘rosea’ is completely suppressed in the marmoreal pallor of Dryden’s language, but the real offence is that ‘refulgent’. ‘Refulgent’ in English is ponderously ...”

“... word in the third line of ‘To a Mouse’, or a word missing from line 82 of ‘A Dedication to Gavin Hamilton’. Such glitches are often the result of poor proofreading, and suggest that the Canongate Burns may have been hastily assembled. Its editorial standards do not approach those of the great multi-volume editions of Burns’s near-contemporary ...”

“... leisured classes, students, ex-students, dole bandits and freeloaders with the habit of literacy. Young lecturers, intense in leather jackets, peddled Raworth. ‘Read Raworth and Harwood,’ they said. ‘They’re the best we have.’ And there they were, Tom Raworth and Lee Harwood, linked in a Penguin, like Ted Hughes and Thom Gunn before them, markers ...”

“... of Charles Olson’s ‘Projective Verse’ manifesto.In his new collection, Late Pickings, Gavin Ewart has nicely parodied the sort of thing that the Review symposiasts had in mind:‘How to write a poem in the American style’                  Use ...”

“... One morning​ in Manchester, in November 2023, a young man went looking for a place to stay. He’d lost his job and couldn’t pay the rent on his flat. When he asked the council for advice, they told him to stay put. He did, until the bailiffs came and changed the locks. He slept rough in a train station. He was on drugs ...”