“... where ‘My trousers grow used to the dung’, is not a Mandarin: What news from the frontier? Is Donald still Colonel? Are there more pupils than teachers in Scotland? I send you this by a small boy with a pointed head. Don’t trust him. He is a Campbell. Where earlier generations of Scottish readers had grown up with Crichton Smith’s more obviously ...”

“... anxiously – and accurately – to his agent, on the opening of Small Craft Warnings in 1971. Donald Spoto believes the story he has pieced together reveals his subject ‘as a man more disturbing, more dramatic, richer and more wonderful than any character he ever created’. This orotund declaration is simply irrelevant, and it does less than justice to ...”

“... time as a way of justifying restrictions on citizens’ interventions at political gatherings. If Donald Rumsfeld comes to give a speech and someone in the audience shouts out that he is a war criminal, the heckler is quickly and forcibly removed. When I came to America, I was amazed that nobody thought this was a violation of the First Amendment. (Shouting ...”

“... to answer at all. The only man who admitted being with Baha Mousa at the moment he died, Corporal Donald Payne, told investigators that the Iraqi fatally banged his head during an escape attempt, and was cleared of manslaughter. He went to jail for 12 months, but only because he had pleaded guilty before the trial to a charge of inhuman treatment. The effort ...”

“... me), has the added allure of buried treasure: its not having been physically excavated, brought to light as a ruin, somehow makes it easier to imagine the city entire, intact, pristine beneath the ground.There’s a rich, deep and ancient seam of stories about magical underground cities, from Enkidu’s visit to the underworld in The Epic of Gilgamesh (c.1800 ...”

“... In the gloom, gold gathers the light against it.’ In choosing this line from Pound’s 11th Canto as one of the epigraphs to his Collected Poems, Geoffrey Hill concentrates our attention on one of the central problems posed by Pound’s poetry and explored by his own. Beauty is no absolute guarantee of truth or morality; art may illuminate or corrupt ...”

“... Donald Trump’s​ strategy for succeeding in the November mid-term elections consisted almost entirely of an effort to foment immigration panic. After it failed and he lost his Republican congressional majority he made a feint at appeasing the Democrats, with a deal to keep government running, then threatened to invoke emergency powers to build the wall his right-wing base demands, and at last offered a hint of moderate conciliation ...”

“... servant in the Department of the Environment and had met his mother, a part-time typist, there. Donald Parr was a Yorkshireman, the son of a Methodist preacher. His wife, Joyce, whom Parr describes as ‘very bright’, was brought up an only child in Gloucestershire, the daughter of ‘a real Cheltenham lady’. ‘They were very different people, my ...”

“... no more. Could listen no more – for beauty with sorrow Is a burden hard to be borne; The evening light on the foam, and the swan, there; The music, remote, forlorn. But there is no competition in such an acknowledgment. A few poems in Montaigne’s Tower are nearly as fine as ‘His Swans’. I think of ‘Habitat’, ‘Joseph Haydn’, ‘In the ...”

“... candle. – A brilliant idea. – Luminous. Simple, too ... every candle has the words Don’t light printed on it in red ink. – Another invention of genius was his urban condom ... What is this crazy book actually about? Well, this is what passes for its plot: the photographer Codac tells the story of the rise and fall of La Estrella, the singer who ...”

“... against Savonarola in particular, he loathed anything that smacked of millenarianism or the inner light, and had a decent respect for the religious behaviour of his fellow Catholics. In politics he took the view that the powers that be were ordained of God. Pope Leo X, a Medici nephew and one of Martines’s pet abominations, hit the nail on the head when he ...”

“... in the United States sometimes like to identify the ancient Persian emperor Cyrus the Great with Donald Trump. Both are vessels for God’s plan on earth. This may seem surprising: Trump is no more obviously Christian than Cyrus, who died half a millennium before Christ was born, and neither would score highly on a morality test. But, it turns out, the ...”

“... Observer articles: ‘As the airport bus rolled along Chelsea Embankment, I looked up and saw a light burning late in the study of the architectural correspondent of the Times. No doubt he was writing, “Sir Hugh Casson, whose death in an air accident …” ’ A good Cassonian ploy. Those who were outside the game would be impressed that he knew who the ...”

“... are now sitting on one quarter of the world’s oil resources. The value of Iraqi oil, largely light crude with low production costs, would be of the order of $30 trillion at today’s prices. For purposes of comparison, the projected total cost of the US invasion/occupation is around $1 trillion. Who will get Iraq’s oil? One of the Bush ...”

“... and sentimentally directed towards a “strong man”, a kind of super-prefect, for the book has a light smell of school changing-rooms, a touch of Stalky.’ The question of Auden’s relation to school changing-rooms – whether it was a valid incorporation of adolescent experience in a mature sense of life, or merely a deplorable fixation – remained in ...”