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“... wanted to be God”.’ And she would retain this intensity across her whole career. When I first read Plath at 17, though I found the early poems hard to understand, and some of the later, fragmented ones too, I do remember the rush, feeling more than knowing that this was the real thing. ‘Daddy’ shouldn’t work: who could write a poem about fathers and ...”

“... up his sleeve. This was an illusion he encouraged, and there was some pleasure in sharing it. Peter Conrad’s Orson Welles: The Stories of His Life does not treat the actual life of Welles or its salient circumstances: his collaborations with John Houseman and Joseph Cotten and Michéal Mac Liammóir; his affairs with Dolores Del Rio and Lena Horne, and ...”

“... he was rescued by the Cambridge lectures of Marxist Raymond Williams, who taught him not to read literature as if it were insulated from history. Old-style Marxists believed that economic reality was fundamental: from this causally sovereign infrastructure all the rest flowed. The picture might be blurred, by reference to Marx’s more liberal writings ...”

“... as a form of individual and collective welfare. What if, I decided, what if, just for once, one read this output as if history mattered and as if the war of ideas was a real thing?For some people, the defining, moulding episode of this moribund century is the Final Solution; for others it is the Gulag, the 1989 revolutions, the Spanish Civil War, the ...”

“... performance or a road accident. Nobody remembers whether they were actually there or whether they read about it later. Found objects, xeroxes of empty rooms in which nothing was about to happen, were part of the overall strategy. Much of which seems, in retrospect, designed for the promotion of the alien consciousness that is sometimes known as Stewart ...”

“... so, considering that not one in a thousand of his readers has any notion how his lines are to be read.’ In the wake of Coleridge’s enthusiasm Donne found a number of 19th-century admirers, but it was only in the late Victorian and Edwardian years that the taste for metaphysical difficulty began to flourish and that the modern surge of his popularity ...”

“... in a sense of the past in art and culture, not in dogma or military and state apparatuses. He read it as calling for an understanding of individuality as a process of becoming and therefore fluid. He also believed that poetry can have the metaphorical power to proclaim a visionary politics. The cycle represented for him an alternative history and ...”

“... that the children ‘had to go to matins and early mass, kiss the hands of priest and monks and read akathists’ – a series of prayers praising God. He and his brothers also sang in the choirs that his father, who learned to play the violin and paint icons, loved to direct – to the exhaustion of the participants. These activities provided Chekhov with ...”

“... Operation Branchform, the fraud investigation that led to a raid on her house and her husband – Peter Murrell, then the SNP chief executive – being charged with embezzlement of more than £660,000 donated to the party.Sturgeon believes that the rights of transgender people are not (and can never be) in conflict with the rights of women. When Isla Bryson ...”

“... in psychological terms and a feat of artistic integration. Roth was ‘furious’ when he read the article. How furious? He ‘thought of ending the analysis entirely’. In other words, nothing changed. That’s not normally the way fury takes Philip Roth. It seems likely that Kleinschmidt, even in the offending article, was giving Roth general ...”

“... he was fascinated by horses, and remained fascinated all of his life. One of his school reports read: ‘Lucian doesn’t seem to have mastered the English language but is fast forgetting all his German. This seems to be quite a good argument against his taking up French.’ His handwriting ‘was, and remained, unschooled’, William Feaver writes in his ...”

“... yer:/Hallelujah, Hallelujah!/We will gather up the fragments that remain.’ In Housman Country, Peter Parker does it by writing the life and times not of the man but of his most famous book: the growing pains of A Shropshire Lad, the vicissitudes of its reception, its cultural ‘aftermaths’. The word comes from agriculture, as Parker points out (new ...”

“... of it all.’ Brophy had stuck newsprint onto the cover, making a collage: ‘Flash’, it now read, ‘a navel by Brigid Bardot’. On the back, the biographical note had been amended by hand. After the sentence, ‘She is socially timid and inveterately literate: she would always rather write a letter than telephone or go there,’ Brophy had ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... school I was surrounded by 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 ...”