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“... of the living – mopping, mowing, gibbering, giving their owl’s cries, causing the tapers to burn blue, sheeted, but never in any circumstances nude. The last of these superstitions is commemorated in a story by A.E. Coppard, chosen for the Oxford Book, in which a dressy female revenant performs a more than usually disappointing strip-tease. She is also ...”

“... off a convincing snarl. Yet he is remembered for certain qualities which appreciate over time. Michael Wreszin’s biography succeeds in spite of its invocation of the conservative revolutionary. While a genuine radical like James Cameron could famously say of himself that he was ‘conservative about everything except politics’, and while it’s true ...”

“... a layer of enigmatic stardust over films I wouldn’t otherwise have been interested in, such as Michael Winner’s Lawman or the Danny La Rue vehicle Our Miss Fred – or, indeed, David Essex’s Stardust. These films were out of reach, but only just out of reach. Forbidden fruit hanging almost low enough to be plucked.I knew that I wanted to read Offbeat ...”

“... keep turning out scripts practically on their deathbeds, Shakespeare could watch the Globe Theatre burn down during an early performance of Henry VIII on 29 June 1613 and, as Samuel Schoenbaum long ago pointed out, decide that this was the perfect time for him to sell his share in the King’s Men, simultaneously funding a comfortable retirement and avoiding ...”

“... household gadgets to practising law and medicine. Prominent Lebanese Americans like Ralph Nader, Michael DeBakey, William Peter Blatty, Senator James Abourezk and General John Abizaid rarely visited Lebanon itself. As attached as some were to their grandmothers’ cooking and to bits of folklore, they preferred to keep the country at a distance. Anthony ...”

“... without the other. Those who have both will find that, among contemporaries, Christopher Reid and Michael Hofmann are classified as love poets but Craig Raine and Tony Harrison as blue versifiers. Only a few poets make both, including Seamus Heaney, who has two poems unworthy of him in the Whitworth (one about unfreezing a vaginal pump, one about a ...”

“... Its first action was to send a detachment of fighters into the village of Chuschi to seize and burn ballot boxes on 17 May 1980 – the day before every other political party in Peru took part in elections that would seal the country’s transition to democracy after 12 years of military dictatorship. As far as Sendero was concerned, the elections were a ...”

“... plotting. They keep plotting, and this has been going on for so long and everybody knows it …’Michael Bloomberg After the former Republican New York mayor endorsed Clinton at the Democratic Convention (‘Let’s elect a sane, competent person’), Trump said: ‘I was gonna hit one guy in particular, a very little guy, I was gonna hit this guy so ...”

“... my shame and my disgrace, And turns your gifts to dross with every breath. He fans the flames that burn within my heart, And fires my longing for that lovely form. I satisfy desire with pleasure, then In pleasure languish for desire again. O, dass dem Menschen nichts Vollkommnes wird, Empfind’ ich nun. Du gabst mir zu dieser Wonne, Die mich den Göttern ...”

“... and he really did feel, in a sublime way, that he was the precious vessel of life which could burn up tyranny and ideology, save Russia and the world. Pushkin, too, was a kind of precedent, for though Pushkin would have laughed at the idea of his poetry saving Russia and the world, or anything else, Blok was not wrong in saying that Pushkin was the real ...”

“... other selections from his working drafts. Yours Presently, the new volume of letters edited by Michael Seth Stewart, shows Wieners cutting across various groups in American avant-garde writing.‘A homosexual,’ Wieners wrote, ‘since he has been a stigma or outcast freak for so long, does not [usually] have a chance to meditate upon himself, even as a ...”

“... was only one way to make it work – by getting the people who knew him talking. Andrew O’Hagan Michael Wood (film critic): Those working-class lads seemed to be everywhere in British films of the 1960s, grunting and sweating their way through the class system, using sex as a narrow and repressed form of guerrilla warfare. We are often told about the new ...”

“... like being whispered to in a language partly understood. At the entrance to the once-used ground a burn is crossed by a single squared timber, bleached silver-gray. In places the moor plants grow in a corduroy, showing where the people made feannagan, ‘lazy-beds’, cutting the turf with their spades and turning it inwards to make a raised baulk, fertilised ...”

“... start, so criticism has been slow to gather momentum. Even the recent spate of studies – by Michael Kirkham, Stan Smith, and the contributors to Jonathan Barker’s Art of Edward Thomas – seems more fortuitous than co-ordinated. Thomas, as Robert Frost reminded him, ‘knew the worth of [his] bays’. However, it is unwise to die in war when a ...”

“... in Manhattan commemorates the stand Bishop Hughes took against a mob threatening to burn down his church in 1844. The defensive amalgamation of Irish, Catholic and Democrat extended into other eastern cities and towns (though not all, and not all the time). Byron concentrates on Americans whose descendants arrived generations ago. But immigrants ...”