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“... us that Rimbaud was keen to show Nouveau the Crystal Palace – ‘the virtual-reality dome’, as Graham Robb calls it. And there, perhaps, is the source of the fantastical dome of the Sainte-Chapelle in the poem, vastly oversized and raised on a massive modern metal frame. ‘Cities [I]’ was copied out by Nouveau, not Rimbaud, and in the sensational city ...”

“... in my house reading novels and I wanted to get out. I’d been interested in eels since reading Graham Swift’s Waterland, in which he describes the curious life-cycle of these fish and I was intrigued by what the river on my doorstep might contain. As a boy I was an obsessive angler, exploring what were then the neglected waterways of north-east London ...”

“... the late 1990s. Watching these videos of healings and exorcisms, ‘which seemed to combine Billy Graham’s stadium evangelism with the kinetic drama of WWE wrestling’, he developed a fascination with Joshua and ‘the sheer unlikeliness of what he had achieved’. The healing offered in charismatic churches usually focuses on modest, non-specific ...”

“... out of vanity. No doubt I’ll come round: 40 million of us have got used to the audio-only kind. Jon Agar’s Constant Touch: A Global History of the Mobile Phone (Icon, £9.99) considers the social as well as technological aspects of the phenomenon. The conceptual breakthrough that makes mobiles possible was the work of D.H. Ring – born, you might ...”

“... he writes of one of the most successful bands to which he has belonged, and of its leader, Jon Hiseman, the other members of the band had little idea of what Jon Hiseman had to put up with ... Hiseman [is] efficient ... he sees what has to be done, and once it’s seen he does it. I suspect it’s not so much that ...”

“... be assessed, or because it finally has been. There are also some welcome defining presences. W.S. Graham is well represented with different poems in both anthologies, restoring a seminal poet to rightful prominence. There are omissions, especially of poets who challenge received opinions, particularly about the Forties and Fifties. We won’t find, for ...”

“... were Richard Trunkfield, a prison officer who had sold details about James Bulger’s killer Jon Venables; Alan Tierney, a Surrey police constable who was paid £1250 for passing information that John Terry’s mother had been cautioned for shoplifting, and Ronnie Wood for assaulting his girlfriend; and Tracy Bell, a pharmacy assistant at Sandhurst, who ...”

“... a pastor at the Ebenezer Baptist Church in Atlanta, where Martin Luther King Jr had preached, and Jon Ossoff, who had interned with the Georgia civil rights hero, John Lewis, who died last July. (Warnock presided at Lewis’s funeral.) And on the morning of 6 January, both Warnock and Ossoff were declared victors in the Georgia run-offs, allowing the ...”

“... the Perdita theme, set in Colorado. The heavily researched To the Last Man (1922) deals with the Graham-Tewksbury feud in Texas and Arizona. The Wanderer of the Wasteland (1923) is a long and ambitious reworking of the Cain and Abel myth set, as the title implies, in the desert. The Call of the Canyon (1924) pits the values of the effete East against the ...”

“... akin to being saved, achieved through the inspired oratory of an apostle, whether a Billy Graham or an Aneurin Bevan. Such spirituality found the material world quite repulsive. Thus Foot objected to the EEC because it would mean joining ‘the rich nations’ club’. And, of course, it would diminish the House of Commons, an unthinkable ...”

“... who drink white wine are ‘poofters’ and believed, according to the paper’s literary editor Graham Lord, ‘that Aids was a fair punishment for buggery’. According to a memoir written by Junor’s daughter, Penny, the great editor and columnist bullied his wife and children while proclaiming the family values that made him such a darling of the ...”

“... Trump’s first modifications of Obamacare and the push by the neoconservatives McCain and Graham for immediate US military assertion against Russia, there has been almost no sign among Republicans of any deviation from an opportunistic solidarity with the president. The Republicans own both houses of Congress as well as the presidency and the Supreme ...”

“... what I was planning to do instead might have seemed inappropriate. On the train back I run into Jon Snow, who is returning from Bradford where he has been making a programme about the decline of the city. I note that at Kings Cross, unlike me, he goes home by Tube, whereas after the rigours of Nidderdale I feel I’m entitled to a cab. Still, as Anthony ...”

“... days of writing to the council were long gone, and now he did half-hour interviews with Jon Snow on Channel Four News, unchallenged. (Many people liked being asked to provide opinions, but they didn’t want to be asked to provide evidence, and they gently slid away.) Grenfell United also had the prime minister to talk to. ‘What happened at ...”