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“... My Husband’s CV King of England from 1461, born Atlanta, Georgia, always Zealous Orleanist, became Cricketer, administrator, son Of trade unionist, Irish mother leader Of Gaelic revival, debuting Covent Garden, Wurttemberg, Sardinia; fought Crimean War, Fifth of seven, acquiring nickname ‘Hetman of the Cossacks of the Don’. After carrying army across Bosporus on bridge of boats, married (19), becoming Government official (wife (1), Gave Shakespeare readings over twenty years, Founding Eragny Press ...”

“... In a sports magazine in the barbershop I found a photo of a man and woman Sitting on lawn chairs in their underwear, Smiling, like they’d cornered the market On leisure, an ad for Mexican liquor, I believe, An open door behind them, an overhang Supported by posts of beech, a clothesline Drooping out of view – I was astonished, A cabin that looked just like mine, he said, In summer the hardwoods dark and heavy, Mossy, even the chairs looked like mine ...”

“... madness. It is a lesson many actors never learn. Of whom was he thinking do you suppose? Possibly Robert Mitchum. Certainly his own concentration is remarkable. In An Orderly Man there are no less than five colour photographs of his home in Provence. Once a shepherd’s cottage and now the sort of property you find advertised for sale in the back pages of ...”

“... Us Silence parked there like a limousine; We had no garage and we had no car. Dad polished shoes, boiled kettles for hot-water bottles, And mother made pancakes, casseroles, lentil soup On her New World cooker, its blue and cream Obsolete before I was born. I was a late, only child, campaigning For 33 rpm records. Dad brought food parcels from City Bakeries In crisp brown paper, tightly bound with string ...”

“... Opera Throw all your stagey chandeliers in wheelbarrows and move them north To celebrate my mother’s sewing-machine And her beneath an eighty watt bulb, pedalling Iambs on an antique metal footplate Powering the needle through its regular lines, Doing her work. To me as a young boy That was her typewriter. I’d watch Her hands and feet in unison, or read Between her calves the clear wrought-iron letters: SINGER ...”

“... Baghdad of the West, gallimaufry of Zahahadidery, Heavy with locos, liners, yards and docks Docked now of shipyards, sculpted, purled into shining Titanium hulls where Wild West meets West End, Your square-bashing sandstone kremlin an offcut of Venice, Your galleries a showy clone of Santiago de Compostella, One-off of sugar and gallusness, Adam Smith and preening baroque, Art-schooled from birth, ark, blast-furnace of ship-in-bottle Models and artwork, arsenic, scuffed footballs and chips, Unsafe haven of hard matriarchs and lasses’ backchat, after-hours Capital of banana boots and over-the-top porcelain fountains, Wannabe Paris, pre-Chicago Chicago, Fifty-first state of glottal-stopped, reeling smirr In Helen of Troy rainhoods, your Charles Rennie Mackintosh brooch Fogged with drizzle, champagned with Victorian catarrh; Tenemented redoubt of roll-ups, landed with God’s geology To use as your doormat, viridian lochs and bens, Renaissance anvil of spires and boot-scrapers, Scotia Bar of bards, Gay hardmen’s last stand, palace of perished velveteens, All second-city edginess, fossil grove, puddled panache, Operatic, fat, incessantly jumpy with static, Gralloching yourself, tearing yourself apart To hit back through lesions or drooled ferro-concrete bridges, Jokes and spread-betting, canals, class-war and bombs Flung by staunch hunger-strikers, polis of asbestos spit, Morphing into a stained-glassed, ran-dan, ram-stam disco Of theme-pub banks intact with mahogany counters, Gothic lavvies, high flats, giddy deserts wi windaes Looking out on the lashing, softening, incoming rain Of tomorrow, its wetness honeycombed in glasshouses, Tobacco lords and dry Snell Exhibitioners, fish that never swam, Inner-city dolphins glimpsed off the starboard side, Spanish Civil War fighters, Gorbals Lascars and lazars, Lens-sellers, subway keelies, bibliographers Bowling on bowling greens or strolling to Bowling or high In library corridors hoisted by gaunt, spinal cranes Seen from the Green, that Champs-Elysées of peely-wally faces Hungry for liberté, égalité, fraternité In all their forms, despite the imperial sweat Of plunder they profited from, the feared years of tears and blood Shed at home in domestic violence, Cath-Prod slashings, and away Mismatches in thin red lines that still hurt, but can’t stop The levity that’s yours and yours alone and will last Longer than Horatian bronze just because it’s laughter ...”

“... Year in, year out The guide still follows A well-paced route Through those small rooms Until the tour group Have all been told And told again About the diarist, About the poet, Brother and sister, Husband and wife; So their plain life Stays still Green in the rain, The stress Less on fame Than on wee mundane Details: How He once failed To neatly ink His name Inside the lid Of His sole suitcase, Though He did Just Find space For that last aitch North of the rest Of wordswort And hunched in the small Window seats You can hear Repeated Still Year in, year out How they strode off-road Down gills, by crags Over the hills, Then nightly cleaned their teeth With salted twigs Dipped In polishing soot From the grate, the hearth, And how The Great Poet of the Heart Walked and talked And talked and talked About his cuckoo clock; How Mrs De Quincey tripped With a bucket of coals; How Coleridge called Then later screamed, Locked In an upstairs room’s Opium dream; How when winter came They skated on the lake, William nicely Getting his skates on To slice His zigzag initials Precisely As he whizzed By on the ice; How, through long nights, They quizzed Friends, Lighting a candle’s rushlight At both ends; How, fond of good food At his Edinburgh club, Walter Scott thought They downed too much porridge, So sneaked out a window To dine well at the pub; How every five weeks They washed their underclothes; What the rent cost; How frost Made the children ill And how those children slept Cold, and no doubt wept In their room upstairs Above the downstairs chill Of an underground stream That streamed More and more Up through the floor Of that slate-floored larder; How Mary Loved Point d’Angleterre lace; And the whole place, Dark now, was dark then, Walls all smoke-blackened, reeking ...”

“... In the section of The Anatomy of Melancholy devoted to the perils of religious enthusiasm, Robert Burton pauses briefly to comment on the complex and meritorious rituals of the hajj, or pilgrimage to Mecca: their fastings, their running till they sweat, their long prayers, Mahomets temple, tombe, and building of it, would aske a whole volume to dilate: and for their paines taken in this holy pilgrimage, all their sins are forgiven, and they are reputed so many saints ...”

“... Croy. Ee. Gaw. Lonker. Pit. Croy: an animal pen, a rained-on pigsty Snorting with mooning bums of bacon, snouts Spike-haired, buxom, Pictish-beasty, rank. Croy. Ee. Gaw. Lonker. Pit. Croy. Once, dogging off a dig on the Antonine Wall, Knees-to-chin in the back of a Beetle near Croy, I eyed the triumphal arches of Castlecary’s British Empire viaduct above Turfed-over Roman barracks ...”

“... Waiting for Someone On the bulkhead over the bar Names of steamers that used to stop here The river silted with new islands and old tyres I’ve been postponing this drink for hours She says, though I hadn’t inquired * Across the alley where the train station Once held court, exposed brick, hardwood floors Where I stood at the entrance, five years old, My hand in my mother’s, red caps pushing carts Steam rising, throbbing train engines Aiming north or south, hissing and blowing Flurry of snow, so much authority among The businessmen, women in mink, conductors * Don’t pay attention to Harold, she insists He isn’t tactful, he isn’t anything But I was studying the smoke-stained Painting beyond the bottles and mirrors A woman examining her shoulder for freckles Or bruises, in a perilous boredom Once, years earlier, I had contemplated Stealing it * Even monotony has moles, places where hair grows ...”

“... Whatever the women in these Weldon and Shuttle novels achieve, it is not through effort or desperation so much as by passive submission. Women’s minds and bodies are the scene of all the action, but apparently no more than the scene; and though uninhibited freedom in this area is a sign of emancipation in modern women’s writing, I don’t know that the effect and the message in these two books will get a welcome in radical circles ...”

“... Wool and War after the Latin of Florentius Wilson of Elgin (c.1500-47) Never mind our European allies. The Arab snuggles into wool. It’s worn By peoples round the delta where the Nile Courses down from sky-high mountain peaks, Splashing broad fields each year, slashing across The desiccated soil of Libya In one grand arc. Upscale designer dressers Sport wool in old Damascus, and so too Does the Cilician youngster when not bathing In sparkling Cydnus ...”

“... of conservative, liberal and Trotskyite historians who followed Trotsky made the same mistake. Robert Slusser’s book supplies chapter and verse on the way Trotsky misconstrued Stalin’s role in the months before October 1917. Stalin was one of a handful of members of the Bolshevik Central Committee who formed its inner core. He seldom did as he was ...”

“... For Alice and Marjorie Klee Wyck Laughing One they call Through soaked air on Vancouver Island Where she snores adenoidally in roadmakers’ toolsheds Inches down night-chilled slimy rungs To the tippiness of a canoe One woman British Columbia Nosing among floating nobs of kelp The bay buttered over with calm Parents christened her Emily Carr Wee f ...”

“... Robert Burchfield, Editor of the Oxford English Dictionary, made a bid to unite two nations divided by a common language by unveiling the Oxford American Dictionary, which includes such words as gridlock (“urban traffic jam”). ’ So proclaimed the Sunday Telegraph Magazine. British and American English do indeed differ in all sorts of ways, as the following list of equivalent pairs will remind any doubters: lift/elevator, push-chair/stroller, bonnet/hood, boot/trunk, windscreen/windshield ...”