“... of food vouchers worth £35 a week. ‘Many asylum seekers come from communities where wealth may be stored in jewellery,’ explains the Home Office minister Mike O’Brien, ‘and it is right for us to take account of that wealth.’ ‘Is the minister suggesting,’ asks Diane Abbott MP, ‘that asylum seekers should sell their jewellery, perhaps their ...”

“... with folk or even fairy tale in ways that are not easy to sort out. Peele’s questing knight may primarily evoke the world of romance, but that is not his only habitat. Jack, and the maidens at the well, certainly suggest folk tale but without being confined to it. Delia, Venelia, the were-bear and the magician Sacrapant who persecutes them could be ...”

“... of future troubles. A baby brother died when she was six, and within the year another brother, Richard, died from scarlet fever. As Susannah Clapp put it in her review of Fitzgerald’s biography (LRB, 20 December 1984), Mew liked to play the child, but child’s play was always a peculiarly fraught affair. In one poem she addresses Sorrow and remembers ...”

“... America’s attitude, the Black poet Paul Laurence Dunbar wrote, seemed to be: ‘Negroes, you may fight for us, but you may not vote for us.’Service in the First World War also brought little lasting improvement in the Black condition. In the Crisis, the monthly publication of the NAACP, W.E.B. Du Bois urged Black men ...”

“... US Embassy, ‘is that there’s lots of money for voter education. The bad news is that we hear Richard Gere and Kim Basinger are coming out to spend it.’ ‘It’s getting like the late Sixties in Vietnam,’ said his colleague. ‘Last time I saw so many people working such frantic hours on politics. Didn’t make a damn bit of difference there in the ...”

“... openness or closed-ness, the drama has drifted away. Ginsberg says that his Collected Poems ‘may be read as a lifelong poem including history, wherein things are symbols of themselves’. But this is disingenuous. He is a very literary poet, even if a line in ‘What would you do if you lost it?’ says: ‘Campion, Creeley, Anacreon, Blake I never read ...”

“... In Marlowe’s Edward II, the royal favourite Gaveston plans delicious entertainments which ‘may draw the pliant king which way I please’. He will introduce musicians to the court, ‘wanton poets’, Italian masques by night, and ‘pleasing shows’. Edward, walking abroad, is to encounter pages dressed as ‘sylvan nymphs’, and Sometime a lovely boy in Dian’s shape With hair that gilds the water as it glides, Crownets of pearl about his naked arms, And in his sportful hands an olive tree, To hide those parts which men delight to see, Shall bathe him in a spring ...”

“... in these books by the light they shed on public matters? Secret Affairs, the most sordid tale, may seem to have the greatest policy significance. But although the trouble between Welles and Hull sucks in many other foreign policy characters (like William Bullitt, with whom Roosevelt broke over the Welles exposé), it has little political ...”

“... well Committed, as Unamended, by Mr Pope in his late Edition of this Poet (1726), a title which we may think asked for trouble. In 1729 the poem became The Dunciad Variorum, slightly revised and now with elaborate encrustations of preface, commentary, appendix etc. The mock-epic had grown a mock-apparatus in which the judgments and the personal follies of ...”

“... week. 15 April. I have given all my literary archive to the Bodleian Library and this afternoon Richard Ovenden, the keeper of special collections, comes round to load up the hundred or so box files and take them to Oxford. There will be more in due course, including all my notebooks and the annotated copies of the printed stuff, but I’m very happy to see ...”

“... not uncommon, of that boundary becoming blurred or even disappearing, an experience that may hold a clue to the feeling, also not uncommon, that Wagner’s work is in some sense not altogether good for us.Respecting boundaries was not Wagner’s thing. Transgression he took in his stride – stealing other men’s wives when he needed them, spending ...”

“... quelled religious enthusiasm in Europe. If national identities grow weaker, religious identities may harden and long-forgotten disputes re-ignite. Evangelical religion thrives on population mobility and social change: the frontierless European Community and the newly-liberated countries of Eastern Europe may both prove ...”

“... aplomb in the world. As the recent chairman of Did you see? he smoothly concealed any distaste he may have felt for the more freakish performers on his viewing panel; and as the one-time pillar of Panorama he was not too pompous to play himself in Yes, Prime Minister and ask questions about the British sausage. His life has been pitched at an agreeable social ...”

“... like naughty English choirboys and girls of the 1940s. Can Modern Baptists be true to life? We may hope so. Carl Robert Pickens is occasionally called Bobby, but more often Mr Pickens, in a Dickensian, Pickwickian way. He has many problems. He has just been sacked from his job as assistant manager at the Sonny Boy Bargain Store in Tula Springs – partly ...”

“... podium’, but he was prepared to give the Hitler salute. A long-standing friend of Gadamer’s, Richard Kroner, taught philosophy at Kiel. In 1934, Gadamer reports, ‘fate intervened to throw Kroner off track’: that is to say, Kroner was sacked because he was a Jew. Gadamer took his job. Despite this little success, further balancing acts were still ...”