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“... Senate.’ After he became leader of the Labour Party in 1963, Wilson placed much emphasis on close Anglo-American co-operation, going against his earlier position. He continued, however, to voice his opposition to any extension of the Vietnam conflict and in March 1964, and again in June, pressed the Conservative prime minister, Alec Douglas-Home, to ...”

“... to caricature as unimaginative defenders of their laager, others, including Desmond Boal, a close collaborator of the Democratic Unionist Party leader, Ian Paisley, were willing to explore the idea of a federal Ireland. Paisley was quick to retreat from this, but did not denounce his friend. (Indeed, Paisley’s reputation as an irreconcilable afforded ...”

“... account of Boswell’s later life which was published six years ago by one of the present editors, Frank Brady – is the worse for its author’s frustrations, prostrations and despairs, interesting though he can sometimes make them appear; it conveys what can often seem like a bitter end for the likely lad from Ayrshire; Boswell’s last legs are apt to give ...”

“... Hardy, Robert Hichens, W.H. Hudson, Lubbock, H. de Vere Stacpoole are mentioned, also Forster’s close friend G.L. Dickinson. Of another, highly gifted friend, Virginia Woolf, he has very little to say, merely a glancing though favourable allusion. While he was writing Aspects of the Novel she published To the Lighthouse, a work he admired and found ...”

“... Lambert – like many noted wits – was melancholic, something that he himself observed of his close friend Lord Berners, who (according to Lambert’s obituary of him) had a subtle technique for preserving solitude in railway compartments: he donned dark glasses and slyly beckoned the would-be intruder in. A brilliant natural musician, a gifted pianist ...”

“... another explicit sexual encounter of predictably little literary effect. The author tries to be frank and decent and open about it, but can’t, because the girlie magazines have got there first and muddied that pool. There were phrases elsewhere that I liked without comprehending – ‘ “It is the harvest of Orion!” cries Beth, and her shadow falls ...”

“... need to open a box, she herself is trouble personified. Pabst’s film is based on two plays by Frank Wedekind, The Earth Spirit (1895) and Pandora’s Box (1904). His Lulu is a feral relative of the beautiful, damaging kept women who haunt 19th-century theatre and opera. A prologue to the first play tells us that she was ‘created to do harm, to tempt and ...”

“... He was interested in the proximity of a laugh to a rictus.) ‘Witty and funereal’ was how Frank O’Hara described Twombly’s sculptures early on. Poussin’s ‘The Arcadian Shepherds’ (c.1628-29) Across from the main exhibition is a room given over for the next two months to the Duke of Rutland’s five paintings, done by Poussin for ...”

“... through printed records as well as his own explorations, and in story after story he brings us close to the motley human lives that have been at home there. He tells the story of Charlotte Dymond, a farm servant at Penhale on the north edge of Bodmin Moor, whose throat was cut by her workmate Matthew Weeks in 1844 (several thousand people turned up to ...”

“... spattered down around my feet. Guillemot egg patterns To come upon a bird’s egg is to be close to a natural wonder, even if Birkhead is perhaps a shade too purple in saying that eggs ‘have an erotic aura all of their own’. My own sightings of eggs have been infrequent (collecting the eggs of Khaki Campbell ducks from among the reeds near a house ...”

“... that Gavin climb into the boot of the car. ‘This time I decided,’ Gavin said, ‘to stay very close to him since it always makes people a bit nervous when they are wielding a gun to have someone that close. When I refused to get into the boot, he said “OK” and took aim at my heart. From the time I used to watch ...”

“... hidden villages, Beckford and more Beckford, England’s highest spire and finest cathedral close, mathematical tiles (bogus bricks) and an abandoned canal that was to have linked Salisbury to Southampton, the Avon to the Test, Wilts to Hants. It’s a measure of Orbach’s curiosity, research and fieldwork that he has found the ruins of this ...”

“... writers at once so lacking in blague and yet so unboring. In substance, many of these poems come close to the sociological, ironically confining themselves to the smaller data of the contemporary. One opens: ‘One Xmas in the High Street’; another: ‘On a wet South Coast night’; a third: ‘Somewhere a bus drives on’; the title-poem invites a ...”

“... the ageing voice of Jack that was never heard. This poem works so well in part because it comes close to the core of the entire book’s power: the speaking of one man in another’s voice which, at best, becomes indistinguishable from his own. Occasionally, writing of ‘a time/ before sex and money/ were a basic right’, Lehmann reminded me of Les ...”

“... argument becomes too obvious for comfort. The formation and function of canons was the subject of Frank Kermode’s Wellek Library lectures, now published as Forms of Attention. The third and concluding lecture is called ‘Disentangling Knowledge from Opinion’. Kermode’s elegant traditionalism allows him to acknowledge the difficulty of distinguishing ...”