“... which he seemed quite literally to live for, would restore him – ‘In sapphire arenas of the hills/I was promised an improved infancy’ – and renew America: The Bridge was to be his ‘mystical synthesis of America’. But his pride had been plunged in his family’s shame, and his country, sliding, as he saw it, towards a trivial and tawdry ...”

“... manners . . . so ancien régime’. Lévi-Strauss, meeting him afterwards on the Capitaine Paul Lemerle, expected to be intimidated and found himself before a ‘principled old maid’: ‘That hairless face, those fine features, that light voice combined with the stiff, fussy manners, presented the almost asexual character I was later to recognise in ...”

“... story. McQueen didn’t enjoy his success much. He was ill-humouredly envious of other actors – Paul Newman, an early rival, was christened ‘Fuckwit’ – and, in the 1960s at least, combative with almost everyone who worked on a film with him. When Richard Attenborough asked James Coburn why McQueen was so rude to him and all the other British actors on ...”

“... inspired by certain facets of the original (such as Pound’s Chinese or Anglo-Saxon versions, Paul Blackburn’s Provençal, Louis Zukofsky’s Latin). Alter, whose concern is Biblical Hebrew and not contemporary poetry, is in the former camp. As he explains in the introduction, his project is to strip away the Christian interpretations implicit in the ...”

“... The animal was killed by my great-uncle, Robin Meek, and a local huntsman, Belli, in the Nilgiri hills in southern India in 1931. Originally – that is, when I was a child – the leopard was in two parts, the skin and the head. The skin was backed with felt, the legs splayed out, the claws still attached. It roamed the houses we lived in, finding a place ...”

“... efforts. To do this, Ellsberg associated himself with another legendary figure, John Paul Vann, then working as an adviser to the US Agency for International Development. With Vann at the wheel of a jeep, they drove all over South Vietnam. Vann taught the neophyte Ellsberg many tricks of the trade: always drive fast because that makes it much ...”

“... Poet’; the deranger of the senses, or ‘Hallucinogenic Poet’; and, as the lover of Paul Verlaine, the ‘Gay Poet’. Mason means myths, I think, in the sense of true stories which become more than the sum of their parts. The problem with them all, he believes, is that they ‘put too plain a face on the poems’, which are ‘vessels of ...”

“... in September. Up near Loch Ness, General Cope was outmanoeuvred by the prince, who went over the hills to take Perth and then, with almost no resistance, Edinburgh. Cope followed, drawing up his army at Prestonpans, a few miles east of the city, where the Jacobites moved to face him. As O’Keeffe describes it, two utterly different fighting methods ...”

“... attribution to Charlotte’s Belgian teacher, Constantin Héger, is laughable: it’s signed ‘Paul Hegér’ (Paul Emmanuel, a character with strong affinities to Héger, is the love-interest in Villette). The date given is 1850; Charlotte left Brussels in 1844. The accent is in the wrong place: Hegér not Héger. It ...”

“... be considered public highways. A couple of stations back up the line towards London is Northwood Hills, which opened in 1933, created by developers along with a large new private suburb. Wolmar quotes a new resident who arrived that December to find the area around the station a sea of mud awaiting construction. The novice commuter went on: ‘Yet, I was to ...”

“... gabled Victorian house. From the high window you could see half of the policeman’s helmet of St Paul’s dome, and further on, a glimpse of Parliament’s spires, and its loyal river selflessly flowing between its crowded banks. At dusk, holding a drink by the window and waiting for Jane to return home, I loved to see the city streetlights arrive in amber ...”

“... and symmetrical. It is something made, not random, illimitable scoop. (Twenty years later, Paul Muldoon will take this principle into a teasing panoptical artifice in Why Brownlee Left, Quoof and subsequent books.) There is nothing like Life Studies, and it is, therefore (poetry being poetry, and, Brodsky says, abhorring repetition), infinitely to ...”

“... who did could be arrested as vagabonds. There was corporal punishment and mass defections to the hills, followed by ‘round-ups’: the cultivateurs were still regarded as state property. Even after independence, conditions were so draconian that there may have been more marronage than before the 1791 insurrection.Sensitive to the symbolic power of the whip ...”

“... many of them left-leaning intellectuals, and the story of their ‘duping’ is familiar from Paul Hollander’s Political Pilgrims (1981). David-Fox makes it a more complicated and more interesting story, with the West seen bamboozling the Kremlin while the Kremlin bamboozles gullible Westerners; the Soviet side is no longer a monolith but includes a ...”

“... in all theoretical fields became evident and our joint work dates from that time.’ Attali quotes Paul Lafargue’s comment that they ‘realised in our own day an ideal of friendship depicted by the poets of antiquity’. Unusual, certainly, but possibly explicable more mundanely by their being compatriots in a foreign city. Marx and Engels were ‘public ...”