“... Rosa would, I suppose, have been unveiled. Unless the carbolic acid caused a third-degree burn, the scalpel slipped, the paraffin migrated or she developed paraffinoma or ‘wax cancer’. In which case, there would, presumably, have been no ‘after’ picture. Worryingly, in her history of cosmetic surgery, Elizabeth Haiken ends the paragraph on ...”

“... produced hardly any result – not a single man at Stamford Bridge in November 1914 when Colonel Burn MP perhaps misjudged the inspirational effect of his reference to the death of his recently enlisted son. The ‘soccerites’ so often despised by rugby men did not always see the point of offering to be killed or maimed. The volunteering of the ...”

“... real books to his name and selections of work in the two most influential anthologies of the time, Michael Roberts’s Faber Book of Modern Verse and Yeats’s Oxford Book of Modern Verse. Eliot was a sincere admirer and generous patron; Yeats was delighted with Barker’s ‘lovely subtle mind and a rhythmic invention comparable to Gerard Hopkins’. What ...”

“... bugs, there’s a reason for it. What he wants to taste is the otherness of insects, their fast-burn and utterly alien sense of time. The quotation from Enrique Anderson Imbert at the start of Eye of the Cricket clarifies the quest: ‘Then I felt within me the desperate rebelliousness of things that did not want to die, the thirst of mosses, the anxiety in ...”

“... boys with what I still think of as normal classic names: Simon, Mark, Peter, Andrew, Paul, Martin, Michael, Stephen, Richard, Robert, David. Girls’ names remained more modish: some Sarahs, Anns and Elizabeths and even some residual Marys, but also plenty of Janets, Jackies, Lisas and Debbies, who soared and plummeted through the bestseller lists in the space ...”

“... among Black men to come to an end:and the National Front is on the rampagemaking fire bombs fe burn we.terror fire terror fire reach we:such a suffering we sufferingin this burning age of rage.Johnson described it as the book on which ‘my reputation as a reggae poet was built’ and it’s often mentioned as one of the most influential works of poetry ...”

“... hygroscopy, but as a by-product gunners slowly realised that they could control the speed of burn by sieving and varying grain size. The increased power of corned powder was not without its dangers – Hall has suggested elsewhere that the death of James II of Scotland, killed by his own gun, may have been caused by the practice of selling European ...”

“... to begin to mention – that writing plays is a young person’s game, and that most playwrights burn out after ten years and fall prey either to drink or to more agreeable and profitable occupations. There are a couple of examples of this tendency from the Restoration period (Etherege abandoned writing plays for diplomacy, and Wycherley for despair). But ...”

“... superstate, and ‘the people’ is plastered across almost every Euro-story. In February, Michael Portillo was praised for reminding Chancellor Kohl that the nation state was far from a thing of the past: ‘OUR nation is very important to the people of the United Kingdom. We’ve given away enough to Europe already.’ Kohl is ‘just interested in ...”

“... hidden in America’s plain sight, and fantastic tales that overstep the limits of credibility (Michael Rogin wrote of his ‘magical dystopian projections’ in a review of Ecology of Fear in the LRB, 19 August 1999). Dead Cities is so fierce and unsettling, one wonders whether Davis believes that a few ‘great comets’ will be necessary to ‘renew the ...”

“... up the slopes towards the French positions. In his classic account of the war, the historian Michael Howard described what happened next:The field officers on their horses were the first casualties. The men on foot struggled forward against the chassepot fire as if into a hailstorm, shoulders hunched, heads bowed, directed only by the shouts of their ...”

“... a lock-in after hours, and we’re not home till three that morning. The phone goes early. It’s Michael Keohane, ringing from Sligo, where he’s president of the Yeats Society. We talk, more about the Middle East than Yeats, and he invites us to the opening of the Yeats Summer School in Sligo that Sunday, and to the party afterwards in Lissadell ...”

“... Pevear and Larissa Volokhonsky (1990), David McDuff (1993), Ignat Avsey (1994) and, most recently, Michael Katz. Apparently there are at least eleven translations into German, nine into French, five into Spanish, and who knows what else.Translators always tell us where they stand on the matter of fidelity – accurate but sometimes awkward, or fluent but ...”

“... it,’ of ‘We live, two trees,’ of ‘the leaves light up, still green, this afternoon,/and burn to frittered reds,’ of ‘the mind, which is also flesh’, of the scriptural ‘all flesh is grass, and like the flower of the grass’ and the scriptural-sounding but actually Homeric ‘like the generation of leaves, the race of man’, of ‘Through ...”

“... smile to herself and sit back again.’ When George’s daughter Anne was born in 1919 and son Michael in 1921, the sisters became enthusiastic babysitters and general chroniclers of their brother’s household. ‘I think George enjoys the thrill she gets when she gives her name in shops,’ Lolly wrote. ‘Mrs W.B. Yeats.’ Lily thought her ...”