“... Convention of 1907. Francis Younghusband was more or less born into the Great Game. His uncle was Robert Shaw, British Political Agent in Yarkand; his father was John Younghusband, Inspector-General of Police in the Punjab, and occasional lecturer on the Russian menace. At school at Clifton, his great friend was Henry Newbolt (‘The sand of the desert is ...”

“... supposed that bicycles played such a part in the gold rushes in Australia and the Yukon? Why did Robert Service and his fellow poets not tell us about the rigours of the 400-mile cycle trail from Dawson City to Whitehorse? Or of the thousand-mile ride from Dawson City to Nome in Alaska undertaken by Edward Jesson, who narrowly avoided cycling on to a stretch ...”

“... one extreme to another, or trying to combine them in some paradoxical unity. For all I know, this may be one aspect of the ‘mysterious’ Russian soul. Since the Soviet Union closed its frontiers and put up its Iron Curtain, the behaviour of its citizens has become less and less predictable to Westerners. When the Western mind concludes that it’s ...”

“... Until her mother meets her in her mouth again        and makes use of what I could not And may appear on my plate next year in a             castrated form as a rasher; until, via a reference to the role of pigs in the Eleusinian mysteries, the transition is made to the visionary:              In the butcher’s window The ...”

“... generally takes into account the existence of parallel explanations or simultaneous pictures which may be equally valid: the fact that your model works does not make it the only possible model, nor does it ever cease to be a mere model. And secondly, one can’t help feeling that despite the brevity of the text there must be a much shorter and simpler way of ...”

“... public inebriation taboo. So it is in recent movies about Hollywood. Larry Levy, an executive in Robert Altman’s The Player (1992), tells his rival Griffin Mill that ‘AA meetings are where the best deals are happening.’ The film follows Mill’s wandering but pin-sharp attention as he listens to increasingly bizarre ‘high concept’ story pitches in ...”

“... possesses nuclear weapons, a blindspot that he was impolitic enough to reveal in front of Theresa May. But complaining about Trump’s ignorance and lack of curiosity is easy: what Bolton and his colleagues fail to do is to measure his strengths. Among them are his mastery of publicity and his ability to exploit the grey space between rules and ...”

“... says, and it can be dated as ‘coming after the novel that won the Prix Renaudot in 1932’. We may feel it lacks the wit and energy of the previous work, but it has its own sinister charm, and it provides a further hallucinated contribution to Céline’s case against war. ‘I caught the war in my head,’ the narrator says early on, as if it was a deadly ...”

“... most of his off-campus time in the company of mad or near-mad poets like Delmore Schwartz and Robert Lowell. Even the professors he saw most of – Van Doren, Richard Blackmur – published poems and were reckoned to be mildly cranky. Van Doren, for instance, would later advise Berryman that ‘scholarship’ was fit only ‘for those with ...”

“... year of what has often been called the Peasants’ Revolt. The insurgency began in Essex in late May, spread quickly to Kent and on 13 June the rebels gathered on Blackheath, entering London the next day. Joined by many from the city, they sacked John of Gaunt’s palace of the Savoy and forced the king, the 14-year-old Richard II, to meet them at Mile ...”

“... should be, that influence has occasioned remarkably little anxiety in the younger poets, such as Robert Crawford, Liz Lochead, W.N. Herbert, Kathleen Jamie and Jackie Kay, who have learned from him. In Edwin Morgan: Inventions of Modernity, Colin Nicholson tries to account for his many-sided subject by examining him facet by facet, but the result is rather ...”

“... of multifaceted disagreement among the members of a large and fractious family. Specialists may occasionally even conclude that, in Lynch’s words, they are watching ‘sand-lot philosophy with pick-up teams’. But philosophy’s pros are hardly any closer to agreement on the issues at stake than they were a couple of millennia ago, and those issues ...”

“... brogues to Lady Diana’s Jimmy Choos – and the emerging picture of a disappearing Britain may be too intoxicating to resist. The islands that these people ruled over are no more, or no more what they were, and the fog of cursing and conspiracy that distinguishes The Crown is already proving a friendly place in which to experience the pomp of our ...”

“... Britain’s EU referendum was not a matter of ‘yes’ or ‘no’. Even so, the government may have reassured themselves that ‘leave’ carried more negative resonances than ‘remain’. Leave … and go where exactly? What kind of affirmation is leave? What kind of identity or vision does it assert? But among the many things unreckoned with by ...”

“... you have to multiply 2 by itself three times (2 x 2 x 2) to reach 8. The usefulness of this may not seem immediately obvious, but the benefit of logarithms is that they allow you to transform multiplication and division into the simpler operations addition and subtraction. Imagine you want to multiply 8 by 16. If you express these numbers as ...”