“... sense of ‘formality under duress’ which Hill once attributed admiringly to the American poet Allen Tate. ‘With what concentration, effort, agony he must have laboured on these marvellous poems!’ Michael Wharton exclaimed in a review in the Spectator, praise which was prominently reprinted on the jacket of the 1985 Collected Poems to sum up a whole ...”

“... through the waxworks of English history. Ackroyd’s early mentor J.H. Prynne, in a lecture on Charles Olson’s Maximus Poems, speaks of ‘that extraordinary poem where Blake decides to rework Milton and to arrange for the demonic possession of himself by Milton.’ ‘There are,’ he continues, ‘congestions of personality which result from that ...”

“... Literature in Transition, plenty of Irish fiction deals sympathetically with ‘Imperial Minds’. Charles Lever’s novels about India, for instance, are alive with adventure, failure and ‘the underlying contradictions of empire – that the British Empire was not, in fact, “British”’. Shanahan might have mentioned that Reginald Dyer, the commanding ...”

“... semantics were not by nature radically discontinuous.‘The essential condition of music,’ Charles Rosen wrote at the conclusion of an illuminating analysis of a pair of Schubert songs in The Frontiers of Meaning (1994), ‘is its proximity to nonsense.’ A less mischievous way to make the same point would be to say that the meaning of music is, in ...”

“... by the greenhouse effect on earth. At the prompting of a geochemist and oceanographer called Charles David Keeling, the observatory of Mauna Loa on Hawaii had been collecting data on the level of CO2 in the atmosphere since 1959. The result – the ‘Keeling curve’ – clearly showed that levels of atmospheric CO2 were rising sharply. In 1979, Jimmy ...”

“... is likewise visually transfixing. Later, he would become a popular Bay Area psychic, a friend to Allen Ginsberg and the Beats and the experimental filmmaker James Broughton and a prominent gay political activist.) Despite Arthur’s chronic selfishness, Esther appears to have treated him in a generous if not saintly spirit. He ended up extracting quite of ...”

“... but again faced no punishment, prompting the resignation of the author of the report, Sir Alex Allen, the independent adviser on ministers’ interests. It was revealed that Johnson had refurbished the prime minister’s Downing Street flat with £112,000 provided by Tory donors, but Lord Geidt, Allen’s ...”

“... or drop from an Appenine, or peer at you suddenly from the hollow of a tree, calling myself King Charles, Sancho Panza, or Herod, King of the Jews.’To Higginson, Dickinson was a ‘virgin recluse’; Todd ‘inevitably’ thought ‘of Miss Havisham in speaking of her’. It’s true that these early editors perpetuated the misleading image of the ...”

“... also stayed the longest: a thickset, sandy-faced man with heavy tortoiseshell spectacles, called Allen, who had a strong temper, which was known to erupt in the early hours of the morning after my father had kept him waiting at the wheel outside a hotel, or on holidays abroad, when crossing some high Alpine pass between one Central European spa and ...”

“... of Guatemala City might be let loose on the continent like a plague bacillus, the CIA director, Allen Dulles, campaigned for them to be brought to trial in Guatemala, but cooler counsels prevailed and they were issued with safe-conduct passes to other countries in Latin America. Guevara travelled on to Mexico City.‘Dulles’s instincts,’ as Anderson ...”

“... a soft opportunity for the stoking of misunderstanding in the name of political progress. Lily Allen knew how people were feeling on the ground, she said. ‘So many community centres have been closed down,’ she said, wrongly. Pubs, she added, had been turned into homes for rich people, presumably rich people very different from Lily ...”