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“... not have to be a corpse (‘I’m asleep, you say, possibly dead’) and also indicates a debt to Michael Longley, who wrote a similar poem about Lowry’s painting. Whereas the vertical man was supposed to carry out dynamic acts of construction, the horizontal man is open to sober acts of reconstruction and it is the latter category which dominates A Word ...”

“... the extraordinary sums of money involved,1 were quickly followed by the prosecution in Britain of Michael Collier. Chairman of Morgan Grenfell, the largest securities firm in the City of London, for making an instantaneous profit of £15,000 on the purchase of shares in a company he knew was about to be taken over. A steady series of cases involving ...”

“... hidden from me over the many years of my devoted if ineffective Anglophilia. This woman considers Michael Holroyd’s Lytton Strachey as the ne plus ultra of distinguished necrophilia. And it is true that as soon as one moves towards the perception of biography as the symptom of such a disorder it becomes difficult to find a more flamboyant instance ...”

“... on the problems of ‘high culture’ and the new media and mass public, does not appear. Peter Collier is not the first to report the rather entrancing self-contradictions in Trotsky’s Literature and Revolution. Would that he had cited the great coda in which Trotsky’s vision of the utopian future is that of an Aristotelian aesthetic exemplified by the ...”

“... bride was Roslyn in The Misfits, driven by her animal recoil from any form of suffering. Constance Collier, who tutored Marilyn briefly before she fell into the clutches of the Strasbergs, likened her to a hummingbird in flight. Collier was one of many professional admirers who saw that she was not really an actress at ...”

“... much further does anguish penetrate in psychology than psychology itself!’ Peter Collier decides on something more clinical: ‘How much more sharply suffering probes the psyche than does psychology!’ I don’t have a better suggestion, but I like to think of Proust as trusting his tautology: suffering is not different from psychology, it ...”

“... the 1860 battle (nor sub Huxley or Darwin or Hooker). Another portrait, another angle. John Collier’s 1890 painting is the most familiar image: a stiff, hard, sad old man, a man of power – he was ‘the Pope’ and ‘the General’ even before he had rank to pull. Collier was good at old men in pain – he caught ...”

“... been a government-promoted Plan for Coal. No major industry could be allowed to languish. But, as Michael Flinn points out, it was not with the actual process of mining that 18th-century government concerned itself, but with the trading of the product. The coastwise traffic in coal was the largest activity of British shipping, a major training ground of ...”

“... translators there are Lydia Davis, James Grieve, Mark Treharne, John Sturrock, Carol Clark, Peter Collier and Ian Patterson.The afterlife of Scott Moncrieff’s 1922-30 version is interesting too. First, not all of it is his. He died before he was able to turn to Proust’s last volume, which was translated first by Stephen Hudson and later by Andreas ...”

“... of the desk-bound and lionised, and J.M. Coetzee too showed signs of becoming a chronic case. Now Michael Chabon has produced Moonglow, supposedly based on conversations from 1989 between a writer called Michael Chabon and his dying grandfather, an engineer for whom space travel in general and rockets in particular were an ...”

“... Shaw the basketmaker, into whose house John Marlowe stormed one evening in 1579 and said, ‘Michael Shaw thou art a thief, and so I will prove thee to be’; and Gregory Roose the capper, husband to the local midwife Goodwife Roose, who probably brought Christopher Marlowe into the world. Though compact – population about 3500 – Elizabethan ...”

“... but Ashton’s young male lovers. Among the most influential of these dancer-lovers was Michael Somes, who, with Alexander Grant and Brian Shaw, remained loyal throughout hit career. Somes was a charismatic leading man, and partner to Fonteyn. There were inevitable jealousies within the company when Somes – at 17 – was given leading roles, but ...”

“... a little deeper for traces of Watkins, but they are there. Reading Watkins’s early poem ‘The Collier’, which depicts a pastoral scene of egg-stealing succeeded by an evocation of work as burial, and which transforms a pit disaster into a golden vision, makes the unreal qualities in Larkin’s ‘The Explosion’ more explicable than any reference to ...”

“... by drugs and guerrillas. Our moral or intellectual engagement with conflict abroad is also, as Michael Ignatieff puts it, ‘notoriously selective and partial’. Colombia does not appear to be strategic. Certainly, for most of its independent history it has not been so. One disdainful late 19th-century Foreign Office note on a despatch from Bogotá ...”

“... live among them, had the definite ring of an oxymoron. The vitality of Ackroyd (as of his friend Michael Moorcock) is on a 19th-century scale. He has made respectable the concept of the man of letters. And, much more than that, he has made it pay. Ackroyd also customised his own biography. We know what we are allowed to know and what we can learn, by ...”