“... in his two great decades. Neither Leavis nor Empson was conspicuously successful in discovering young talent: during World War Two Empson was for a time passionately enthusiastic about the mild romantic verse of Sidney Keyes. In America, Wilson seems in later years to have sensed that the youthful Randall Jarrell might emulate his discernment of the ...”

“... This, and other evidence of fighting at close quarters, is dispassionately surveyed by columns of young fighters, dressed in tattered clothing and packing the standard Kalashnikov. Mid-morning and sunset bring the routine sound of Ethiopian shelling. The smell of fried bread and peppers wafts through the narrow warren of ...”

“... solution to the Irish problem. From the start they had little patience with what Warren Fisher, Head of the Civil Service between the wars, described as the ‘blackmail and bluff (oddly enough called loyalty)’ consistently deployed by the then Northern Ireland Government. Fisher prescribed a dose of reality for these ‘parochial ...”

“... can’t be blamed really for not having the ability to imagine how nostalgia, brilliant clothes, Warren Beatty, Faye Dunaway and some fancy editing would elevate nihilistic murderous young couples into cultural icons for the 20th century, while a quietly seething poisoner would look dreary and unstylishly old hat. In this ...”

“... the place where, when you have to go there,/They have to take you in.’ To which her husband, Warren, replies: ‘I should have called it/Something you somehow haven’t to deserve.’ Home is Marilynne Robinson’s third novel; published four years after Gilead and 27 years after her astonishing debut, Housekeeping, it explores with unsparing precision ...”

“... transformations. This account is both more accurate and more attractive, especially to young people of diverse backgrounds and media competencies who might be new to much of the work on display. (Such changes attest to the influence of an in-house think tank called Contemporary and Modern Art Perspectives, or C-MAP. Rather than franchise ...”

“... journalism towards movie options, by way of song lyrics – ‘Rottweiler Blues’ – for Warren Zevon. He was never stuck in the paperback original ghetto, his mayhem justified by a care for indigenous wildlife and a surreal gift for disposing of unpleasant humans in inventive ways. But Gregory Corso is in danger of slipping quietly out of the ...”

“... as a reviewer was aimed at the vitals of his early Agrarian mentors: ‘To expect Tate’s and Warren’s poems to be most influenced by Ransom’s is like expecting two nightmares to be influenced by a daydream.’ To ‘get’ most of Jarrell’s reviewing jokes you had to be well in the know, and maybe this off-the-cuff allusiveness was one of the keys ...”

“... I know bitterly criticise the IRA, then suddenly, but it’s linked, he shifts to describing how a young IRA man was ambushed near an arms dump: ‘The whole town’ heard him pleading with the soldiers for mercy before he was shot.’ ‘Is that so?’ I say, a polite nothing that hides a confused mulch of attitudes – rule of law, Gibraltar, squaddies, seen ...”

“... How much are the Poor to be pitied, & the Rich to be blamed!’ the young Jane Austen exclaimed in a marginal note to Oliver Goldsmith’s History of England. Mary Toft, the notorious 18th-century ‘rabbit breeder’, was undoubtedly very poor. But was she to be pitied? Contemporary accounts of her hoax identified her as ‘poor’ in ways that combined sympathy with contempt ...”

“... the world.’ Reed became an immortal, and was buried under the Kremlin wall. Sixty years later, Warren Beatty impersonated him in the movie Reds. He was anything but a callow romantic. In 1917, Reed was already a socialist journalist who had covered revolutionary war in Mexico and had involved himself not only in writing about some of the most brutal ...”

“... to savour a thimble of blood tapped from the neck of a vicious goose tethered to a telephone pole; young Chinese gangsters in American suits beating up a shopkeeper; beggars fighting over their pitches; beautiful White Russian bar-girls smiling at passers-by’. It struck him as ‘a magical place, a self-generating fantasy that left my own little mind far ...”

“... in the 1930s by the photographer François Kollar, shooting in a desolate concrete chamber where young French children were learning to swim. An instructor in a suit looks on from the edge of the pool. Pale white arms push forward through the dark water or extend like luminous floats either side of bobbing heads. Flooding in the pits was one of the risks ...”

“... Shown as part of the arts series Monitor in 1962, it purported to follow a day in the life of four young artists: Boty, Peter Blake, Derek Boshier and Peter Phillips. For Mellor, growing up in ‘meagre’ circumstances in the East Midlands, London as the Sixties started to swing was a revelation, ‘a vision of something wonderful’. After she died Boty’s ...”

“... Brando (he asked to fuck her; she asked if he had got his teeth capped). She may have slept with Warren Beatty – ‘I guess I did. Probably once.’ She met the Canadian prime minister Pierre Trudeau at a London premiere and nearly married him after a whirlwind romance, though she says less about him than about his preferred midnight snack, ‘a glass of ...”