“... 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 ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... light brown hair into a series of upsweeps’, as she scrutinises ‘the small worry lines’ that mark ‘her otherwise smooth porcelain skin’. We watch her ‘walking carefully down the stairs in a pair of high-heeled shoes’. We’re told that she chose her dress carefully, opting for something simple, in the knowledge that soon ‘she would be among the ...”

“... exposed his thin skin. For him, Manhattan has always been the opposite of what home was for Robert Frost, ‘the place where, when you have to go there, they have to take you in.’ Wa-a-a-a-h!Winning the presidency was never a deep desire, more a branding scheme that spun out of control, but Trump has tried to turn his victory into a means to compel New ...”

“... wildly. I went to the loo and stared at my face and felt the dread creep up into my chest like frost, knowing that this could, maybe would, happen to me. It did. Sickness on sickness on sickness on sickness, weakness on weakness, one hospital stay slotting neatly behind another, each documented and, seemingly, endured with impossible good cheer. Moore had ...”

“... warned that he must get himself to a warmer climate or die, as Keats put it, ‘like a frog in a frost’. Brown wrote to George on Keats’s behalf asking for help to buy his passage to Italy, but George was busy trying to sell a steamboat and could not free up money without losses he was unwilling to incur. It was the contributions of some of Keats’s ...”

“... one presumably needs to make sense of everything else).The most significant book published to mark Charlotte’s 200th birthday was Claire Harman’s Life, the first serious new biography since Lyndall Gordon’s Charlotte Brontë: A Passionate Life in 1994 and Juliet Barker’s The Brontës from the same year (biographies seem to come in generational ...”

“... of her as Graham’s wife was still expected of her. The la-di-da voice had to be kept up to the mark. The drinking needed a bit of discipline even if the parties never stopped. The returns, on the other hand, were fewer. There was nothing like the same degree of ease. Colin’s cars broke down, his plans were erratic and in London his parents were too close ...”

“... English, French; pianist; willing to care for children; highest credentials. Write Box 4435, Frost-Smith Advertising, London EC2.’27 May 1938: ‘Young Austrian lady (Jewish) seeks position Governess; experienced; good references; teaches German, French, Italian; would accept modest salary; good family. Write Box T.1653, The Times, EC4.’6 June ...”

“... activity. Eyes down watching the blade and glancing behind to check on the quality of the mark you have made, seeing it not quite correct, not bulbous enough, or unevenly rounded, finding the tail too elongated, not sharply enough defined, and beginning again to make it better, eventually to make it right. It’s that I imagine myself doing now.My ...”

“... and colours, and outlines, sharp or blurred, with which scabs, and bruises, and grazes, can mark the skin, nor was I content until I also had a mental list of the yet more formless stains that shame a child’s underclothing as the secretions of the body spread outwards, and I would try to commit them to memory even as, in the sanctuary of the ...”

“... cronies. Jeremy HardingThe​  total number of Ukrainians on the move has passed the two million mark. The figure is rising. Before the Russians invaded, the UNHCR put the Ukrainian diaspora worldwide at roughly six million, the great majority in Europe. Just under twenty thousand of those were in France, where figures for new arrivals are also on the ...”

“... Look it up.’ Norman looked it up in the Dictionary of Quotations to find that it was Robert Frost. ‘I know the word for you,’ said the Queen. ‘Maam?’ ‘You run errands, you change my library books, you look up awkward words in the dictionary and find me quotations. Do you know what you are?’ ‘I used to be a ...”