“... auto-destruct apparatus is probably beyond the capabilities of psychiatric case study. Norman Mailer or Mary McCarthy might have had a better shot at evoking what makes Rudy tick, much as Mailer examined the biomechanics of the ‘New Nixon’ in Miami and the Siege of Chicago and McCarthy taxonomised the cast of Watergate in The Mask of ...”

“... concern for the disadvantaged has not exactly endeared him to the Conservative Central Office. As Norman Tebbit replied, in words reminiscent of Walter Bagehot, it is not surprising that the Prince is so sympathetic towards the unemployed: he is by way of being one of them himself. All this is indicative of a deeper change in perceptions of royalty that has ...”

“... After listening to over an hour of complaints against the Police, the Deputy Chief Constable rose and said: ‘We are not on the side of the Government or the NUM. We are in the middle and we don’t wish to be there.’ He asked the villagers whether they would not admit that there were wrongdoers among them. He then gave an apology and promised to ...”

“... at Windsor she had thermometers in ivory cases in every room to ensure that the temperature never rose above 15°. Poor Albert was so cold he had to wear a wig to breakfast. By 1861 body and spirit were fatally undermined. His feelings for Victoria were not, as he told her, enough to make him ‘cling to life’ as she did. He spoke openly about expecting to ...”

“... you felt, craved critical and collegial approval, the respect of his peers and elders (he and Norman Mailer became friends), a place in the pantheon, a penthouse view. Not Bret. He didn’t seem to care about any of that traditional jazz. Whether it was a frosty pose or reflected a genuine disposition, Ellis didn’t court establishment acceptance and ...”

“... French language to get away with iconoclastic pornography – that is, if you take it seriously. Norman Mailer gets away with it by clowning; so does Burroughs. Acker makes the mistake of taking herself seriously here, as though ‘ultimate outrage’ were not a commodity being peddled by her agents and publishers as assiduously as ‘towering ...”

“... Lance Richardson speculates that they may have discussed poetry. Both men were protégés of Norman Holmes Pearson, an instructor in the English department at Yale. Pearson was a correspondent of Ezra Pound and Wallace Stevens as well as F.O. Matthiessen, the Harvard scholar and cousin of his pupil, who had taken his own life earlier in 1950 under a ...”

“... Fifth String Quartet, Byzantium – a setting of W.B. Yeats for soprano and orchestra – and The Rose Lake (a fifth symphony for orchestra in all but name) flew off the page with improvisational abandon.Oliver Soden​ was born in 1990, and his Life of Tippett is refreshingly free of old prejudices and stale arguments. (The previous standard text, Ian ...”

“... An anointed king of England hadn’t taken one of his own subjects for a wife since before the Norman Conquest, so why did Edward? Certainly, he was ‘wild with desire’ for Woodville, as Penn notes, and ‘used to getting what he wanted’. Penn opts for an Anne Boleyn theory of events – in Woodville, Edward ‘met his match’. If he wanted to sleep ...”

“... desires and concedes that the power rests on language alone. An apostrophe such as Blake’s ‘O rose, thou art sick’ figuratively closes the gap between the post-Enlightenment poet and the natural object he addresses. Yet ‘it figures this reconciliation as an act of will, as something to be accomplished poetically in the act of apostrophising; and ...”

“... men, Proust and Elvis, Muhammad Ali and the Beatles, are grouped around an unfolding, vulval red rose. The only woman depicted is Jackie Kennedy in the open car, pink pillbox hat turned towards her husband as he clutches his throat. II is all women, soft-porn pin-ups surrounding a stark, full-frontal nude with pubic hair, all set against the landscape garden ...”

“... who recognised his gifts and took him with his other clever boys down the Calton Hill to Rose Street. In those days, a sort of café society still flourished in Edinburgh. You knew which set you’d find in which pub, and young Karl was introduced to the mighty poets of Milne’s Bar and the Abbotsford: Hugh MacDiarmid, ...”

“... the worst:expect the best:andtake what comes‘Not a Hannah Arendt quote! :/’ Samantha Rose Hill, then the assistant director of the Hannah Arendt Centre at Bard College in New York State, tweeted back, across the hours and the Atlantic Ocean. ‘I know! ’Twas sweet gift,’ Stonebridge replied, then added: ‘We should make our own.’‘One ...”

“... Stuckey’s Bank, a sizeable local house which had already swallowed up several tiddlers. Thomas rose to become vice-chairman, and so in due course did his son Walter, after serving a full apprenticeship in the Bristol counting house. Even after moving to London with his wife, Eliza Wilson, Walter remained a key figure in Stuckey’s. Eliza was the daughter ...”

“... Enochian symbols. On his head is a reindeer herdsman’s pointed felt cap with earflaps, like a Norman battle helmet reconfigured by Joseph Beuys. It is warm. Kötting’s thick white gypsum facemask is melting. Later, coming into the outskirts of Tunbridge Wells, as a sharp wind from the east begins to bite, he puts on a kneelength transparent rain cape ...”