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“... may have revealed an equally shaky grasp of natural history, yet still seemed nearer the mark.) There was no pleasing either side in that divided decade: Arthur Scargill was as hostile to the BBC as Thatcher, denouncing the TV news as ‘pure unadulterated bias’. And so it goes on, with complaints and threats stacking up like Brexit-blocked ...”

“... only that he kept a certain kind of male company. In the 18th century it was clearly possible to mark out a man like Gray as ‘effeminate’ – an adjective sometimes used of Horace Walpole and his circle by contemporaries – without implying anything about sexual preference. Walpole’s friend William Cole called Gray ‘nice’, ‘even to a Degree of ...”

“... shall run three times around the boulevard rings of Moscow in nothing but my jacket in a 30-degree frost. I shall run away from the yellow hospital of the Komsomol arcade straight toward mortal pneumonia ... if only not to hear the ringing of pieces of silver and the counting of printer’s sheets.’ He reclaimed his inner freedom, fell greedily upon the ...”

“... other in a tentative balance, was advanced both in Heaney’s contribution to Homage to Robert Frost (which he published in 1997 with Joseph Brodsky and Derek Walcott) and in such poems as ‘Weighing In’ and ‘The Swing’ (an Ulster version of Frost’s ‘Birches’) in The Spirit Level (1996), the most recent book ...”

“... made immediately clear) who goes by the name of the Great Lindemann. This is a day that will mark a brutal discontinuity in the Friedlands’ family life, and a moment when narrative particles throng together like sand grains at the neck of an hourglass. Here is another overlap with the world of McEwan’s fiction, the uneasy harnessing of short story ...”

“... universe, ‘replete with wonders’, had on the rapt nature religion of, say, Coleridge’s ‘Frost at Midnight’ – where the deity makes a distinctly Priestleian appearance, ‘Himself in all, and all things in himself’. At his most exuberant, Coleridge would write in a winningly unguarded way about his fraternal feelings towards donkeys and rooks ...”

“... of Dresden used to gather quietly among themselves each 13 February; the newspapers did not mark the anniversary. The rapes were remembered behind a curtain of silence until, many years later, foreign journalists and historians published what all older Germans knew. As recently as four years ago, the German public were shocked when Grass wrote in the ...”

“... now called Juneteenth, Ellison envisaged a racial melodrama that would put him in the company of Mark Twain (Pudd’nhead Wilson), James Weldon Johnson (Autobiography of an Ex-Colored Man), William Faulkner (Light in August, Absalom! Absalom!, Go down, Moses) and Nella Larsen (Passing) – all of whom examined the meaning of American freedom as flight across ...”

“... strict form in interesting ways (such as Ashbery’s 17-line ‘And Others, Vaguer Presences’). Frost, Larkin, Merrill, Heaney and others succeeded in producing modern sonnets in traditional form that feel natural in expression, as Yeats did with ‘Leda and the Swan’ – still a dazzler. But a long sonnet sequence along the lines of Sidney’s Astrophel ...”

“... they were displaying their tender zones, and those young leaves were taking a risk, a sudden frost could annihilate them at any moment.’ Even in the long history of the pathetic fallacy it’s unusual to have nature fall so perfectly in step with human emotion. The appearance of the title word in this sentence (anéantir in the original, an infinitive ...”

“... for the mirror of cold,Sitting beside your lamp, there citron to nibbleAnd coffee dribble … Frost is in the stubble.Then came Edmund Wilson’s essay ‘Flaubert’s Politics’, which ends with this sentence: ‘As the first big cracks begin to show in the structure of the 19th century, [Flaubert] shifts his complaint to the shortcomings of ...”

“... It is as though heat had been applied to the language (calefaction?), and made – in Mark Rudman’s phrase – ‘fused images’. Lines from Lowell’s Leopardi suggest themselves by way of confirmation: ‘I could forget/the fascinating studies in my bolted room,/where my life was burning out,/and the heat/of my writings made the letters ...”

“... where bullets crossed –crowned with a crown of snowflake pearls,a flowery diadem of frost,ahead of them goes Jesus Christ.These soldiers of course are not quite those of Brecht and not quite those of Yeats; cousins rather than closer relatives. And the soldier has his reason for killing Katya. A stupid, ugly and inadequate reason, to be ...”

“... place is seemingly deserted, with none of the 1500 US personnel who work here showing their face. Mark Steel speaks first and despite the rain and the cold manages to get the audience laughing, though not the policemen, who in fairness are probably cold and wet and resent having to be here at all. When it’s my turn I say that I don’t in principle object ...”