“... Raine’s poems present something more than a concatenation of metaphors, effective though these may be. They are most effective when drawn from one area of experience, grouped around a single event or figure, or unified by a strong narrative. The tradesmen from the ‘Yellow Pages’ of The Onion, Memory, ‘In the Kalahari Desert’ (for me, his most ...”

“... march of paragraphs. (In her 2014 book on Hrabal, Monika Zgustová tells us that each year on 1 May, the holy day of Communism, he made a point of publicly emptying his latrine, a personal ritual whose loud stink interfered with the parp of official power. So much for marching, displays, parades.) Each sentence, chapter, book, is a sack being held open ...”

“... deeply reliable commercial optics, such that the destruction of Dolly Parton’s interestingness may be judged a solid success. In a way, he offers a compliment to real life by always allowing it to baffle art. No sentence, in the Patterson universe, is equal to the suggestions and nuances of life itself; his galaxy is a constant flow of words that drift ...”

“... technology, especially in the conmmon-carrier and interactive versions of teletext. It may well not be taken, given the pressure to adapt the technology to current forms of news and marketing. But there would be immediate gain if broadcast news could be, in effect, footnoted, given the developing teletext services which can both handel and recall ...”

“... bachelor pad. The scheme was denied planning permission, but the drawings were published in the May 1962 issue of the magazine. The ‘almost cartoonishly modern’ three-storey building, as Preciado describes it, was to have a Miesian glass façade, under which a basement garage would harbour a bright blue Porsche. It was to be built around an indoor pool ...”

“... support to a Libyan coastguard force that would intercept migrants before they reached Europe. In May, Rome delivered the first consignment of speedboats. In mid-2017 the number of migrants began to drop significantly. In 2018, fewer than 120,000 crossed the Mediterranean, the majority from Morocco to Spain; less than 20 per cent crossed from Libya to ...”

“... men’ and merchants as well as ‘lords spiritual and temporal’. But while Empson and Dudley may have been more than usually effective agents of the royal will, they were, as everybody knew, merely the best-known examples of a type of servant that had been at the heart of Henry VII’s regime from the outset. These ‘new men’, as they would become ...”

“... Przewalskis in the Chernobyl exclusion zone All these are feral horses rather than wild ones. It may be that no wild horses remain. Przewalski’s horse, named after a Russian explorer, was thought to be the last truly wild breed, though now it seems likely that they are descended from the domesticated Botai. Stocky and short-legged, they resemble the ...”

“... Whereas Fraz fades from Hark in a cruelly absurd death scene, Tovah thrives. The drone apocalypse may have arrived, but she’s once again writing poems, apparently good ones: ‘Tovah begins to read her poem, and the more she reads, the more she feels herself spiralling up and away from her words, her voice. The more she reads her poem, the more it sounds ...”

“... in Haaretz, documentation declassified by the IDF shows that ‘in the months of April and May 1948, units of the Haganah were given operational orders that stated explicitly that they were to uproot the villagers, expel them and destroy the villages.’ The Haganah, which became the IDF, was responsible for at least 24 deliberate massacres of unarmed ...”

“... Indeed, they are dark, smelly, dank passageways where, as Oscar Newman … argued, “crime may occur more frequently than elsewhere.”’ Robin Hood Gardens​ coincided with what John Boughton describes as a ‘golden age of council house building’, but in Municipal Dreams he doesn’t include it in his ‘pantheon’, ‘despite the affection in ...”

“... The law no longer allowed judges to use torture as part of their questioning – something that may have emboldened Thiess in giving his testimony. They heard that the pastor had warned him off his ‘devilish deeds’ before, describing the everlasting punishment he would receive. Thiess had agreed to stop – it was necessary if he was to be allowed to ...”

“... still in his twenties Fried had become a leading critic of contemporary art, an occupation which may not sound very different from being an art historian, though perhaps less respectable. Yet from Baudelaire onwards, an engagement with contemporary painting has been vital to some of the greatest poets; and the best art critics, aside from those who were ...”

“... over this attack and made the James brothers proxies for the persecution of ex-Confederates. This may have worked, but it was opportunistic. The James Gang gained sympathy not because of their actions, or Edwards’s support of them, but because of the actions taken against them. It is this that led to the amnesty bill that was nearly passed by the Missouri ...”

“... where they showed their gratitude by electing a man in a monkey-suit as mayor, an event which may finally have sent Peter Mandelson round the bend.) But Blair has not yet been able to embrace the referendum that Goldsmith among others forced him to sign up for, the one on Britain’s entry into the euro. The reason, of course, is not the will of the ...”