“... sublimity: I have carried it with me each day: that morning I took my uncle’s boat from the brown water cove and headed for Mosher Island. Small waves splashed against the hull and the hollow creak of oarlock and oar rose into the woods of black pine crusted with lichen. I moved like a dark star, drifting over the drowned other half of the world ...”

“... plot.Poem-novels, or poem-stories, are all about us – James Fenton’s ‘A German Requiem’, Anne Stevenson’s ‘Correspondences’, Blake Morrison’s ‘The Inquisitor’, Motion’s ‘Independence’, the plotty, tessellated pattern of the poems in Carol Rumens’s Direct Dialling, with its East-West love story. One sees rhyme used, as Byron used ...”

“... fantasy tabloid) decisions concerning human rights that have emerged from the courts. Under Gordon Brown, Labour has even shown a tentative interest in extending protection into the realm of social and economic rights: its discussion paper on a bill of rights and responsibilities was widely mocked when it appeared early last year and the idea has been shelved ...”

“... military transport plane and flew to a gravel wasteland surrounded by razor wire, humvees and brown portaloos. Only the sand in the wind indicated I was in Baghdad not Kabul. Over the next three weeks, I either sat behind concrete T-walls and sandbags or looked at the street through the inch of bullet-proof glass in my vehicle. When I saw Iraqi friends it ...”

“... there was nothing false or laughable in him. At 27, Achille-Cléophas had married the 18-year-old Anne-Justine-Caroline and immediately produced a son, Achille, who, as his name foretold, was to follow in his father’s footsteps. After Achille, however, there were three children who all died shortly after birth, so that Gustave was born eight years after his ...”

“... at the other; blue and pink – ‘poverty and comfort mixed’ – were fused to produce a purply brown; a blue street outlined in black signalled that its very poor inhabitants, though generally law-abiding, also included those classed as ‘semi-criminal’ or ‘degraded’.Booth’s survey was a lengthy process of collaboration and revision. Over the ...”

“... in March 1962, hoping to be warmly welcomed to Austenland and live among Lizzy Bennets and Anne Elliots. Dashing out on deck as the ship approached harbour, she found that it was cold, grey and wet: ‘It felt like walking into the inside of a grave.’Her landfall did come to seem like a death of sorts, at the very least of her illusions about life in ...”

“... States last night.’ As Trump dispatched his ‘shiny and new’ missiles to Syria a year later, Anne-Marie Slaughter, a former Obama apparatchik and president of the New America Foundation, tweeted that it was the ‘right thing’ to do. ‘It will not stop the war nor save the Syrian people from many other horrors,’ Slaughter conceded, and ‘it is ...”

“... to an upmarket clientele which had at one time included King James’s fashion-mad consort, Queen Anne, and he was – not least – a familiar acquaintance of Shakespeare. A rather respectable figure, it may seem from this summary, an immigrant success story, though there is also some evidence to suggest another, less respectable side to him. Just a few ...”

“... in silent rage. It is clear from Dido Merwin’s account in an appendix to Bitter Fame, Anne Stevenson’s biography of Plath, that she could be intensely demanding and jealous. And in a letter to his brother after the break-up of the marriage in 1962, Hughes refers to ‘Sylvia’s particular death-ray quality’, before saying that they are now ...”

“... airport paperback – one has Pity the Nation, another has Harry Potter, another has Dan Brown. But the texts keep morphing into Arabic in front of the readers’ eyes: انجيلينا   Angelina بانانا   Banana تيتيكاكا   Titicaca ‘All the travellers’ books, to their great consternation, are intruded upon by the Arabic ...”

“... reinforces this quality, seeming to echo the ‘lovely’ but ‘unyielding’ sentences that Anne Enright describes in the volume’s introduction. It’s difficult to look at Brennan here and not think of the words she puts in a missionary’s mouth in ‘Stories of Africa’: ‘You could say that an exile was a person who knew of a country that made ...”

“... long after their vogue had passed. Jack Warner with his catchphrase ‘Mind my bike’ and Joe E. Brown were known to me only as personalities from the comics not from the medium which had originally made them famous. I suppose this might be taken as an extension of the Hegelian doctrine that the owl of Minerva takes her flight only when the shades of night ...”

“... also what is billed in the programme as a ‘Special Guest’. This turns out to be Gordon Brown, who makes a decent speech too and one which, as R. says, must be impromptu as he repeats himself. Flattered to be gathered up by Neil and taken in past the explanatory displays (‘You don’t want all this foreplay, do you?’) to the figures ...”

“... Jesse Florian in Farewell, My Lovely, who ‘had weedy hair of that vague colour which is neither brown nor blonde, that hasn’t enough life in it to be ginger, and isn’t clean enough to be grey’.When Marlowe meets the journalist Anne Riordan, the nearest Chandler comes to creating a female character not entirely ...”