“... has never been a travel poster like Harmonium,’ Randall Jarrell said; ‘He mutter spiffy,’ John Berryman (or Henry) wrote approvingly in The Dream Songs. But Stevens lived in the North even as he wrote raptly and rapturously about the South; while writing colourful poems he made his living writing colourless, transactional letters. He too once wanted ...”

“... a blessed ‘St Gugg’ fellowship. While in England she made influential friends such as Donald Hall and the Plath-Hugheses, and published in the New Yorker. Katharine White, the poetry editor, soon offered her a first-read agreement.In the meantime, Rich had broken off her engagement to Sumner Powell, a Wasp Harvard boy, and fallen in love with the Jewish ...”

“... George ran for mayor of New York and finished ahead of Teddy Roosevelt, though behind the Tammany Hall candidate. Henry George Foundations still exist in London, Melbourne and his native Philadelphia. Liberal Democrats in Britain continue to hanker after George’s single land tax to replace all other taxes, as do some American conservatives. All the ...”

“... Suffering from depression, he was analysed by the perceptive but corrupt psychotherapist John Layard, who went to bed with him; his father paid for the analysis, and Layard, when Redgrove explained the Game to him, said simply: ‘That’s your mother.’ With its epitaph from Baudelaire – ‘C’est elle! Noire et pourtant ...”

“... who look at life through the telescopic lens of a rifle, and that was the model for him, much as John Wayne was once a model for boys who thought cowboys put decency back into the world. On 20 July 2012, James Holmes, after dyeing his hair a kind of purple, went to a midnight screening of the Batman movie The Dark Knight Rises at the Century movie theatre in ...”

“... panics, his horse bolts, he faints and falls and breaks his hip. When the great surgeon (‘Sir John’) who tends him reluctantly confirms that he will never be able to ride again, Sainty ‘heaved a sigh of unmistakable relief. “Ah! well, that’s a comfort, anyhow,” he said.’ From now on, Sainty’s lameness will be the useful badge of his ...”

“... hospital; the police turned a blind eye. The construction workers then marched up Broadway to City Hall, where they confronted the flag flying at half mast in honour of anti-war protesters who had recently been shot dead. Some of the men scaled the building and raised the flag while the rest warned city officials never to lower the American colours ...”

“... Blair’s call for the 1951 Convention Relating to the Status of Refugees to be rewritten, and John Townend’s complaint about the ‘mongrelisation’ of Britain.) Balfour warned Parliament that the Jews ‘remained a people apart, and not merely held a religion differing from the vast majority of their fellow countrymen, but only intermarried among ...”

“... give away). Simon Leys, that wise Belgian Sinologist, critic and novelist, rightly notes, in The Hall of Uselessness, Simenon’s ability to achieve ‘unforgettable effects by ordinary means. His language is poor and bare (like the language of the unconscious) … It would be difficult to make an anthology of his best pages: he does not have best pages, he ...”

“... would like to think they are journalists, not cultural ambassadors. But the director general, Tony Hall, is not so sure. He has claimed that ‘the World Service is one of the UK’s most important cultural exports and one of our best sources of global influence.’ Similarly, the current director of the World Service Group has argued that the BBC is in the ...”

“... Write, Speak contains little except interviews; when an answer sounds like an echo in a marble hall, it is because he has repurposed it from Speak, Memory. The sameness is unrelieved – until the late 1960s, when various malpractising journalists begin asking him about hippies, which is pleasant. (‘I feel nothing but contemptuous pity for the illiterate ...”

“... at George Cukor’s house in Hollywood in 1972. Fifteen famous directors are there, including John Ford, Rouben Mamoulian, Robert Mulligan, George Stevens, Robert Wise, William Wyler, Billy Wilder. Hitchcock sits next to Buñuel, says very little, then at one point puts an arm round his companion’s shoulder and says with deep ...”

“... military establishment and the new government in Washington, a town presided over by another John/Jack the lad. Profumo’s go-getting reputation and unstuffy demeanour made him attractive to the men around JFK, who liked that he didn’t seem like a typical Brit, never mind a typical Tory. He was extremely sociable, and well suited to the work ...”

“... better description of the Palestinian situation. We need what the Marxist cultural theorist Stuart Hall called a ‘conjunctural’ analysis: a descriptive mapping of the forces – economic, political, social, ideological – at play in a given historical moment, a mapping that can be used to identify possibilities for, and obstacles to, practical ...”

“... in the 1990s was self-imposed. But as Georgina Born makes clear in her definitive analysis of the John Birt and Greg Dyke eras, the consistent impetus came from government. It’s no surprise that Margaret Thatcher wanted to take on the BBC – if anything, the surprise is how long it took her. (In her first term, Thatcher’s main concern was with BBC ...”