“... not have been published had Frost not upped sticks and relocated his family – Elinor and four young children – to England in 1912. He was 38. He had placed individual poems in American magazines but no publisher had shown interest in a book, and the teaching he had undertaken to supplement his farming income was exhausting and impossible to do in tandem ...”

“... programme for developing the hydrogen bomb so enthusiastically promoted by his former colleague Edward Teller. That opposition, combined with continuing suspicion of his left-wing political affiliations before and during the war, led in 1954 to the AEC hearings, which resulted in the withdrawal of his security clearance. (Robert had flirted with joining the ...”

“... Posterity’), which gives an account of his life up to 1351, is no less carefully tailored. As a young man he studied law in Montpellier and Bologna, but swiftly abandoned it after the death of his father. He describes his youth as full of the usual ‘vanities’ – fashions, feasts, amorous dalliances. These, we are led to believe, took place before he ...”

“... same period made up the New Poems of 1907 and 1908. Forget the horrid and ubiquitous Letters to a Young Poet, forget Duino, forget The Sonnets to Orpheus. They are for me his greatest poems, and Malte his greatest book.The New Poems are written under the shadow of ‘mon grand ami Auguste Rodin’, to whom the second (1908) volume was dedicated: Rilke had ...”

“... and by publicising severe punishment of a prominent case to deter others.’ Incarceration of its young spokesman for 15 years? Arrests were ‘infinitesimal’ compared with days gone by, and ‘no deaths were recorded.’ Tibet? Despite enlightened efforts to ‘reduce the risk of separatism’, Lhasa has had to witness a ‘tragic cycle’ of ...”

“... banker who had built canals in the Midlands and got into Parliament. When ill health caused young Cecil to join his brother Herbert in growing cotton in Natal, he went with two thousand pounds from his aunt, which cushioned the brothers against their amateurism. While African labourers hoed rows for them, they wandered into the interior, looking for ...”

“... suffer the loss they were afraid of, yes,Holders of one position, wrong for years.This has the young Auden’s typical combination of doomwatch and kicking energy. The voice of the inevitable is speaking, the voice of evolutionary force, the voice of what he would eventually and notoriously, in the last stanza of ‘Spain’, call History. So it is proper ...”

“... lost. ‘Losing a country’, or ‘losing a home’, if I gave the matter much thought when I was young, was an acute world-historical event, forcibly meted out on the victim, lamented and canonised in literature and theory as ‘exile’ or ‘displacement’, and defined with appropriate terminality by Edward Said in his ...”

“... of specification) seems to me to be the supreme virtue of a novel,’ he wrote. His essay cheers young writers on, pushing them, against English habits of gossip and insularity, towards an organic wholeness in their work. He argues for fiction that is unafraid of new subject matter and multitudinous perspectives, advising writers to try ‘to catch the ...”

“... father has left the room – being there was only ever a prelude to leaving – and I sit alone, a young girl, listening with mounting anxiety to the sound of a Romanian pan flute. This is the music of restless souls – urgent, melancholic skids in a minor key, an unending complaint so depressing at times that one of its greatest exponents, Rezső ...”

“... see now because they don’t work here.’ The next morning as T. gets ready for work again, his young son might tell him: ‘No Daddy – no work. Work’s closed. No. Work’s closed.’ T. earns £10.90 an hour, which brings him a salary of £22,105 a year without overtime, a figure above the UK living wage of close to £16,000 but below the median wage ...”

“... are] cowards, loungers, without majesty, without awe, antiquity, foresight, character; old bucks, young bucks, and Biddy Buckskins. He runs on colloquially, ‘talking’ warmly and unselfconsciously. If only his friends could do the same. Since Bridges destroyed his own letters to Hopkins, the new material in this edition – the letters back to Hopkins from ...”

“... into popular use through officialdom – “safari” reports were a regular part of a young Assistant Commissioner’s paperwork – so that by 1905 or so it was colloquial in tiny Nairobi but unknown in London.’ The word became world-famous after 1908 when Teddy Roosevelt, relinquishing his Presidency, decided to hunt in East Africa and put his ...”

“... into the scope of ‘immoral conditions’ in the local community. They recruited from among the young enlisted men stationed at the base a number of sailors who volunteered to serve as decoys and to seek out and identify men they suspected of being sexual perverts. The volunteers agreed to have sex with these men, to infiltrate their social networks, and by ...”