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“... rock group Coil, now sadly no more since the deaths of its two founding members, Geoff Rushton and Peter Christopherson, whom I knew, though not especially well. When I interviewed Rushton (a.k.a. John Balance) in 2000, one of the things that came up was his deep, abiding love for Kate Bush. Actually, it was more like he saw her as some form of household deity ...”

“... though Binyon, with customary care, thinks Cameroon the likelier origin. He was a gift for Peter the Great, and rose from servitude to become a general in the Army, responsible by the end of his career for all military engineering in Russia. Pushkin’s father belonged to a family that had distinguished itself in ...”

“... of rapes recorded in the Democratic Republic of Congo, on which their attention was focused, rose in the following year and hasn’t significantly decreased since. It is just one facet of this ugly reality – one more thing to contend with – that while attention to violence against women may be sparked by anger and a desire for redress, it might also ...”

“... far from ascending in a straight line from the death of Elizabeth to the accession of Queen Anne, rose during the middle decades’ of the century, only ‘to dip again with the restoration of the old order in 1660’. From that ‘cyclical pattern’ Fraser draws a contemporary lesson. Were vigilance now to slacken, the process of ‘liberation’ might be ...”

“... World, of which he became chairman. He did not put this fact in his Who’s Who entry. As sales rose from 40,000 to 4.4 million in 1941, the 25 per cent shareholding Derek and his identical twin brother, Vivian, inherited in the paper – the Flesh and the Devil, as it was known before a rougher age called it the News of the Screws – became so hugely ...”

“... from The General Theory was: reflate at all costs. He got rid of not one but two chancellors – Peter Thorneycroft and Selwyn Lloyd – for refusing to expand demand fast enough. Not long after Lloyd’s restrictive 1961 budget, Macmillan was urging him to prepare a reflationary budget for 1962; two days after his 1962 effort, Macmillan was already egging ...”

“... Put his graphic versions of his poems alongside printed versions and the reason becomes clear: O Rose thou art sick. The invisible worm That flies in the night In the howling storm: Has found out thy bed Of crimson joy: And his dark secret love Does thy life destroy. The poem gains when printed plain. The richly dressed text, to the frustration of the ...”

“... Lawson meant when, in Seventies-speak, he proclaimed: ‘Rules rule, OK?’ Admittedly, when he rose to his dizzy pinnacle of power at No 11 Downing Street, he found that his famous neighbour had her own, crucially different, conception of what Thatcherism meant. It meant whatever she said it meant. It meant pleasing herself. It meant, in short, asserting ...”

“... But if we try to get back behind it, Facing the wide glare of the children’s day, Facing the rose, the dark sky and the drums, We shall go mad no doubt and die that way.The repetition makes the speaker sound slightly hypnotised by what lies beyond language’s limits, and the comma-less last line runs a touch too fast for comfort. ‘Sick ...”

“... being reduced to rubble, to reflect on Nicias’ words. Coventry, Dresden, Warsaw and Hiroshima rose again, phoenix-like, from their ashes; might Aleppo and Mosul, despite all the suffering and destruction, one day recapture some of their former splendour? Such thoughts were very much in my mind while reading Robert Garland’s retelling of Athens’s ...”

“... necessarily make them good composers, of course, but their standing and visibility in society rose and with it the standing of classical music more generally. The first organist at St Paul’s to receive a knighthood was John Goss, though he had to wait until his retirement in 1872. After that new organists often got one immediately. The pattern at the ...”

“... to the culture of male-bonding, heavy drinking and poebiz showing off which constituted the Rose Street milieu of 1950s Edinburgh. For a time, Brown mixed there with Hugh MacDiarmid, Norman MacCaig, Sydney Goodsir Smith and other poets and literati. With its prostitutes and smoky, male-dominated pubs sporting signs which stated ‘Women Not ...”

“... Purgatory, while only one is in Paradise. This is John XXI, but among the blessed he is hailed as Peter of Spain, a notable logician – with no hint of his high office. Corbett sees a ‘pamphlet-like immediacy’ in Dante’s view of the papacy, as he held not just that individual popes were sinners, but that the institution itself was profoundly ...”

“... the ruins of the twin buildings of the General Staff headquarters, built in the 1970s and clad in rose marble to evoke the canyon of the Sutjeska River in Bosnia-Herzegovina (the site of one of the more famous of Tito’s offensives). The Neoclassical Foreign Ministry across the road is hidden by scaffolding. On the pedestrianised Knez Mihajlova Street, the ...”

“... Walcott’s extravagance of poetic diction and tendency to verbosity off-putting in the past’ (Peter Porter); ‘I feel that the fuss and the language are not quite justified by the donné’ (Roy Fuller). Derek Walcott has suffered, perhaps more than any other contemporary poet writing in English, from accusations that his work is too showy. Some of the ...”