“... in French, wang-wang in Chinese. They utter seemingly any monosyllable at all, but imprint the mark of dogdom by always uttering it twice.) Language spoken and overheard can yield complex wonders. This is from the BBC’s Gardeners’ Question Time: ‘When you tie a standard rose and this applies to any standard ...”

“... pieces of naughtiness and in Craig Raine’s image of an excited watering-can and a peculiar rose – and this is because, more than anything, the blue verse tradition is about being in control – of your verse-form as well as your feelings. There is no room in this tradition for a poem about sexual compulsion such as Ted Hughes’s ‘A Childish ...”

“... keep a straight face when trafficking in absurdity, though she throws in an occasional exclamation mark, and she is resolutely fair to an exotic who would today be baited routinely. Glyn’s novels, she assures us, ‘continue to inspire readers’, though it is hard to know who these may be. A further glance at the reference shelf shows that Mrs Leavis, in ...”

“... Sensitive Plant’ and ‘The Witch of Atlas’ Shelley ‘takes a common object such as a rose or a boat, and the more he describes it, the less we remember what it is.’ Or to refer, with Leavis, to Shelley’s ‘weak grasp upon the actual’. There is no merit in urging Shelley to buck up and look hard at a ...”

“... Chiang Kai-shek celebrated his 50th birthday (by the Chinese way of counting) in October 1936. To mark the occasion, every schoolchild in the country – or in those parts not already occupied by the Japanese army – was instructed to contribute 15 cents, and every teacher one dollar, to help purchase fighter planes from the US ...”

“... a brilliant certainty and roguery about it, as when he delivers his famous attack on the Symbolist rose: The rose is a likeness of the sun, the sun is a likeness of the rose, a dove – of a girl, and a girl – of a dove. Images are gutted like scarecrows and packed with foreign ...”

“... could have a contagious disease.’ Wilfully misunderstood by his father-in-law, Grandfather Rose, Theodor has to make his prejudice explicit: ‘I mean the race problem.’ The family is reduced to silence. Sollors analyses Toxi at length: he describes the genesis and early versions of the movie, as well as its reception, and recalls seeing it himself ...”

“... accelerated as faith in the promises of utopianism has declined. The very idea that utopias, those rose-tinted cities stranded outside time, might have a history is itself a recent discovery, and has largely sprung from assessments of More’s Utopia, the work that revived the ancient genre of the ideal commonwealth for the modern world. More’s work has been ...”

“... Does my bad breath offend you? Pick a name of the unknown ypres master l as alias. Abandoned mark iv tanks, rostered by sex, Marlbrough s’en va-t-en . . . frozen mud wrestlers entertaining the Jocks. Arrest yourself: for grief of no known cause, excuse me. A superflux among bit players l which happens to be the best part: unnatural wear and tear but ...”

“... fear of losing control, has just passed out from excess of alcohol. This isn’t irony: the words mark the beginning of a narrative section (‘The sober Michelangelo dozed off’) and irony would be out of place. It’s more that the adjective has become a Homeric one, freed of the obligation to mark a particular instance ...”

“... print run was more modest, at 5000 copies. There has not been another: 13,000 is the high water mark. These are very good figures, but as I heard from rival publishers belonging to the same group, Shiji, the biggest in Shanghai, if The Hobbit had got the same advertising and promotional shove when it came out in Chinese – around the same time as Finnegans ...”

“... in 1858. His father was a sculptor and stonemason: so were two of his four brothers, Joseph and Mark. Robert became a jeweller, while Charles was a churchman, who moved to India where he became a chaplain in Delhi as well as a folklorist. The stories contained in his book Romantic Tales from the Punjab, were, he said, of the ‘highest possible ...”

“... curls and clever …/Uri, I’d call him, my Uri/A short name, lucid and soft.’ The name quickly rose in popularity among Jews in Mandatory Palestine, and after 1948 in the new state of Israel. ‘Uri’ had become a synonym for the sabra, the local, brave, tanned and patriotic Jew – the ‘new Jew’. When Helmut Ostermann, a Jewish child born in 1923 in ...”

“... blamed the failure of negotiations before Christmas on the interference of the transport minister, Mark Harper. Public sector pay has increased at a lower rate than private sector pay almost every year since 2011. At the end of last year, private sector wages were increasing by just under 7 per cent, while public sector wages were rising by less than 3 per ...”

“... plant life, stands as a ragged prospectus for the remaining ten years of Van Gogh’s career. His mark-making would reliably quicken wherever vegetation grew, but the stems and spurts always responded to the weight of life as people experienced it. There was a modern human condition, burdensome and coal-dependent. Infusions of nature (and later, by ...”