“... with a world of objects, familiar and incomprehensible, recalling a past to which we otherwise had no relation: large buff tea-chests, stamped with ideograms, still lined – is this a trick of memory? – with Chinese newspapers; dusty books and papers, with Chinese characters on the back, in the glass case in the hall; a ...”

“... measure. At their larger gatherings, ecstatic ‘ecological grief’ is indistinguishable from no-nonsense activism as the rank and file enact the apocalypse, and chanters and drummers rehearse the ceremonial music that could hold it at bay.XR’s model has been replicated in dozens of countries, but by far their most successful campaigns have been waged ...”

“... in 1977 aged 91, after which the poems more or less stopped coming. Andrew Motion thinks this is no coincidence.Larkin pinpointed 63 as his probable departure date because that was when his father went, turned by his mother into ‘the sort of closed, reserved man who would die of some thing internal’. Sydney Larkin was the City Treasurer of Coventry. He ...”

“... novels of the 1930s and their treatment of violence and war and isolation and said that ‘perhaps no other artist in the English language was so aptly prepared by his earlier psychic life for the experience of wartime Germany, for the shades of humanity who populated Europe.’ In the 1970s Stuart began to write book reviews for the weekly Dublin newspaper ...”

“... lifting furniture into it and other things wrapped in blankets. ‘Will he be coming with us?’ No reply. Which, in its way, was a reply. I was eight; I knew the game.I have no memory of the packing up of our home, just that I was standing on the pavement outside holding a small, colourful box whose lid closed with a tiny ...”

“... I was in my fifties had also to do with the growing likelihood, I felt, that my natural mother was no longer alive. And that if I were able to establish anything about her, only one of us was liable to come as a shock to the other. I was adopted in the early 1950s, many years before the Children Act of 1975 made it possible for adopted people to inspect their ...”