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“... proclaims the contrary. So does the concluding line – ‘Never such innocence again’ – of Philip Larkin’s 1960 poem ‘MCMXIV’, invoking the summer haze, the ‘dark-haired children at play’, the      moustached archaic faces Grinning as if it were all An August Bank Holiday lark ... of the war’s early days. No one thought it would be a ...”

“... possessive woman I have ever known’. She did not get what she wanted. Macmillan’s solicitor Philip Frere pointed out that divorce would be fatal for his political career and recommended a ‘west wing-east wing’ solution, traditional among the estranged upper classes who had houses large enough for the purpose. Until she died in 1966 – suddenly, of ...”

“... the 1990s as CEO of Halliburton, the world’s largest oil and gas services company, Dick Cheney drew $44 million in salary from an outfit that on his own Brechtian admission saw war as offering ‘growth opportunities’. Millions of dollars more in ‘deferred compensation’ were earmarked to tide him over during his time in government. In December 2003 ...”

“... respond – from want of contact and knowledge, not desire – to Chris herself. More and more he drew on his own imaginative invention and on literary analogues.’ Haffenden’s conclusion, however, that they are ‘at worst ... enormously self-engrossed’, should be qualified. When Berryman is describing a real meeting, as at the end of sonnet 42, the ...”

“... conversation) that he has never been introduced to Woolf’s work: ‘My book’s sub-plot is Philip K. Dick, sales-talk, Hollywood and schitzophrenia.’ So I’m forced to describe Woolf in terms of Dick’s excellent ‘straight’ novels of the sliding life in the Western States, In Milton Lumky Territory and Humpty Dumpty in Oakland. The keenest ...”

“... it didn’t have the faintest idea what was going on in the country. Lacking local knowledge, it drew parallels with Russia, Eastern Europe, China and Korea, portraying events ‘as part of a global pattern of communist activity’. An unredacted part of Cullather’s book records that the coup was thought to be both ‘more ambitious and more thoroughly ...”

“... practical exponent and the major intellectual theorist of a war on Iraq, Kenneth Pollack and Philip Bobbitt, are former ornaments of the Clinton regime. But as substantial policy contrasts tend to dwindle in Western political systems, symbolic differences of style and image can easily acquire, in compensation, a hysterical rigidity. The Kulturkampf ...”

“... in Bergamo about the progress of work for the church of Santa Maria Maggiore. And the will he drew up in Venice in 1546 contained autobiographical material. These documents suggest a personality which Peter Humfrey in his 1997 study of Lotto described as ‘introspective, hypersensitive, often prickly and quick to take offence; but also generous in his ...”

“... to a point, Ballard scraped away enough mortar to remove two bricks from the coalhouse wall and ‘drew out several handfuls of coal, which I divided between us’. Ballard used his share to light a makeshift stove and brew some hot tea for his mother, who was ill in bed. ‘As the glowing coals warmed my hands, I wondered what Henderson would do with his ...”

“... face and torso recognisably attached. In The Human Stain (2003), the ill-conceived adaptation of Philip Roth’s novel, in which we are supposed to believe that Anthony Hopkins is a black man and Kidman a humble janitor, we see the Kidman rear from a different angle as she ‘is stretched out quite naked, amber, curved, ripe and Giorgione-esque’. In ...”

“... with Scott Fitzgerald), a ‘somewhat rackety woman’, and a character at the Oxford of Philip Larkin’s novel Jill is said to be ‘an aggressively rackety minor-public-school undergraduate’. ‘Rackety types have a link with people of the intellect,’ Powell writes in his notebook, and his novels are full of quite unintellectual types, usually ...”

“... the baillis who first appear in the administrative echelons of the French monarchy in the reign of Philip Augustus, the armed retainers of tenth and 11th-century Japan who attached themselves to regional lords rather than to the central government, the early English factory-owners still operating, so to say, as islands in a sea of small-scale artisan ...”

“... wrong. Somehow, the subject of critics’ errors came up, whereupon my mother surprisingly drew attention to this recent one, adding: ‘Not that I read the book, of course.’ Ehhh????? ‘Well, I started it and read as much as I could stand and then flipped to the end to see what happened and saw that the fellow cut his throat and thought, I wish ...”

“... in serious poems can work will be seen in Auden’s ‘Shield of Achilles’, and in many of Philip Larkin’s poems. Rhyming in Larkin amounts to invisible virtuosity: you’d notice the difference if the rhymes weren’t there, but you hardly notice that they are. ‘That Building’ is a good case of this negative brilliance. Couplets are especially ...”

“... being expounded to a large gathering of Spanish scientists. A distinguished French civil servant drew charts of an interlocking structure of bureaux and conseils. A Harvard professor explained that the only way to do it was to exploit the creative rivalry between autonomous Federal agencies. Sir Brian Flowers (now Lord Flowers – one of the biggest wheels ...”