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“... London sparrow (gone, vanished) which puts in a rather showy appearance in the opening sequence of Martin Amis’s Yellow Dog. Amis is working so hard, as is the sparrow, to be live, engaging, on-the-money; the throwaway charm is so affected, so sub-Keatsian, that the inevitable violence that follows makes for a very pretty natural break. ‘A sparrow, a ...”

“... than in his loves. In 1967, in the United States, he met the translator and writer Norman Thomas di Giovanni, then in his mid-thirties. Over the next few years, as he moved to Buenos Aires, di Giovanni co-ordinated the translation of Borges’s poetry into English, using some of the best contemporary poets and translators such as Alastair ...”

“... electricity generation from nuclear fusion is a very long way off. Researchers at Lockheed Martin are working on a nippier approach that could, they say, ‘be ready with a power plant in ten years’ that ‘would enable us to meet global electricity demands by around 2050, in time to have a significant impact on our climate.’ But no one else seems ...”

“... audience is a daunting prospect and few people have tried; the most successful, until now, was Thomas Keneally, whose novel Towards Asmara (1989), set in the guerrilla-held areas at the time of the liberation war, was a picaresque homage to the Eritrean people. Michela Wrong has attempted something different: an idiosyncratic, free-ranging history of ...”

“... undefined and undefinable beneath them’. This is apparent in the poems he wrote while living on Thomas, Lord Fairfax’s estate in Yorkshire, where he was appointed tutor to Fairfax’s daughter Mary some time after Fairfax resigned as Commander-in-Chief – or Lord General – of the Parliamentary forces. Fairfax resigned because he did not want to take ...”

“... innocent homoeroticism discussed by Paul Fussell in The Great War and Modern Memory (1975) or in Martin Taylor’s less fashionable, less thesis-driven anthology, Lads, republished in 1998. In Taylor’s collection, so often are the poems bad, unaware (Ronald-like?) or puny that the best among them – Gurney’s, Edward ...”

“... Holy Ghost through his mouthpieces Saints Matthew, Mark, Luke, John and Paul, to the Fathers to Thomas More – whose Utopia and Latin poetry might never have seen the light but for Erasmus, and many others – he is surely the most remarkable writer of his time and the most sophisticated in management of script, print, patronage and even the visual ...”

“... 10 March. At 6:45 a.m. I set off by car service to Newark airport to catch the 10 a.m. Virgin/Continental flight to Gatwick. At this time of the morning the New Jersey Turnpike is too busy altogether. This use of altogether, I’m reminded by Terence Patrick Dolan in A Dictionary of Hiberno-English, means ‘wholly, completely’ and may be compared to the Irish phrase ar fad, particularly in its positioning at the end of a sentence ...”

“... Romantics, Rebels and Reactionaries, reviewed in the LRB (Vol. 3, No 21) by Christopher Ricks; and Thomas McFarland’s marvellously over-the-top Romanticism and the Forms of Ruin, which also appeared in 1981. (One might commend, en passant, the Princeton University Press as a place where inventive, wordy studies in Romantic ideas receive elegant ...”

“... names with less familiar radicals like John Learmont and Joseph Mather, whose ‘God Save Great Thomas Paine’ could provide a standby for republicans wanting something to do when the National Anthem is played. I would have liked to see Wordsworth represented by some of the more abrasively radical verse of the 1790s; but we are given several sonnets, and ...”

“... that follow were indeed first spoken by Democritus. In his 1989 book on plagiarism, Stolen Words, Thomas Mallon excoriated the academic special pleading that elevated Sterne and Coleridge from literary shoplifters into masters of bricolage and intertextuality. Their cases are analysed along with that of the Victorian novelist Charles Reade, and the American ...”

“... to this? Early on, Howe focuses on the key figure of Edward Wilmot Blyden, who was born in St Thomas in the West Indies in 1832 but lived much of his life in Sierra Leone. Even before the European Scramble for Africa, Blyden formulated the essential problem faced by people of African descent. Should they argue that they are identical with Europeans but ...”

“... stories: ‘Instead of Pinocchio, Joe McCarthy; instead of Uncle Remus, tales of Paul Robeson and Martin Luther King.’ Even Alexander Portnoy is a trusted aide to New York City’s liberal mayor John Lindsay, a tribune of the Great Society. In the thick of his erotic adventures, he can’t help remembering how he spent his childhood listening to ‘marching ...”

“... Sometimes the poets would get up and dance. A singer in a broad-shouldered suit, looking like Dean Martin or Max Bygraves, would swagger in and improvise verses: these were often satirical comments on state interference with independent-minded Arabs. The poets admired these witticisms very much. At the Baghdad Shooting Club (hard by the Baghdad Horsemen’s ...”

“... glamour and splendour. Among the more solid figures who appear on this stage from time to time are Thomas Hardy, visited more than once in Dorchester: Tea at Max Gate. Lady Stacie there, a descendant of R.B. Sheridan – and a fashionable lady, formerly a great beauty. She gushed to T.H. about his novels at the tea-table. He shut her up by saying ‘I am not ...”