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“... the Negro Intellectual (it is structured around discussions of James Baldwin, Lorraine Hansberry, Paul Robeson and Richard Wright). All the same, it ‘opened an extraordinary space of recalling that there had been a radical black intellectual past’, Robinson explained in an interview in 2013. ‘As a participant, he had every right to recall it in the ...”

“... But there were moments of real conversation and he spoke of real grievances,’ Adeline Vaughan Williams wrote after one of many visits with her husband, Gurney’s one-time teacher of composition, admirer and longstanding advocate. My own hunch is that other Gurney personae usually written off as lunatic fictions – Michael Flood, Frederick ...”

“... Britain in 1951 knew what to celebrate. At the start of the opening ceremony – a service in St Paul’s – the King praised the nation’s courage in the world wars; the official handbook declared categorically that ‘Britain is a Christian Community’; brightly coloured pavilions on the South Bank paid tribute to picturesque countryside, seaside ...”

“... enjoyable new history of the Protectorate, which collapsed nine months after Cromwell’s death, Paul Lay is bracing and undeceived in his judgments. He is the editor of History Today, and he writes in the best tradition of that magazine, accessible but sound in detail, with an alert eye for the significant details academic historians sometimes slide ...”

“... Cup, questions of personal rig-out seemed to be of central consequence. David Beckham’s Jean Paul Gaultier sarong, plus his newly blonde-streaked looks, may well have had something to do with Glenn Hoddle’s less than friendly treatment of him in England’s opening games. And this treatment may in turn have led to Beckham’s game-turning folly against ...”

“... discredit Lawrence’s advocacy of sexual polarity. Balbert catches them quoting out of context: Paul Morel’s patronising view of the suffrage movement is not Lawrence’s, but part of a dialogue with Clara Dawes which will eventually reveal Clara’s emotional failure; Miriam Leivers’s polemic against sexual inequality reveals her lack of ‘healthy ...”

“... while supervising a Work Projects Administration programme. She had had a copy of William Carlos Williams’s In the American Grain at the corner of her desk, which she had bought so she’d have something to read on the long subway ride to and from work. The couple had a son, Paul, in 1943, a musical prodigy and now a ...”

“... Left and its intelligentsia 1968-86 and not allude to, among others, E.P. Thompson, Raymond Williams, Stuart Hall, Perry Anderson, Robin Blackburn, R.D. Laing, and the personnel of the New Statesman, would be to create another kind of absent centre. Caute solves this problem by resort to the teasing deceits of the Disraelian political romance. That ...”

“... a Bible on matters linguistic. Nor, one imagines, could a post-Willinsky scholar do what Raymond Williams did in the Fifties and base a major intellectual enterprise on the confident assumption that OED represents ‘a systematic, reliable and comprehensive history of the English vocabulary’ – raw lexical material. In the Foreword of Keywords ...”

“... So characteristic of Paul Muldoon’s poetry as to be almost a hallmark is the moment, unnerving and exciting in about equal measures, when his speaker is suddenly revealed to himself as someone else. The whole world expands and changes in ‘Cass and Me’ when, as a boy, he climbs on the older Cass’s shoulders, and they lean out                across the yard As a giant would across the world ...”

“... Paul Auster​ ’s new novel, 4321, is a lightly edited two-inch-thick Bildungsroman divided into four timelines, each a possible iteration of a single character’s life. That character is born at the end of a prologue consisting mostly of family prehistory: Russian Jews emigrate to New York and bear a child, Stanley; Stanley marries comely Rose, and they beget our protagonist, Archie Ferguson ...”

“... desart yet unclaim’d by Spain? The answer to the question posed in these lines quoted by Paul Mapp in The Elusive West and the Contest for Empire turned out to be a resounding yes. In 1738, when Dr Johnson wrote his poem, some two-thirds of North America was still terra incognita, as far as Europeans were concerned. A vast expanse of territory, home ...”

“... quite go away. In this early work – written in the 1940s – Paz is thinking of something like Paul Valéry’s idea of what is ‘given’ in a poem and what is made, what seems to come from a place that is not the writer’s mind, and what is manifestly a matter of craft and labour. ‘The gods give us a certain first line for nothing,’ Valéry ...”

“... itself a demonstration of how far the balance of power has swung against the US. Twelve months ago Paul Bremer, the US viceroy, was blithely talking about continuing the occupation for two years. His first act on arriving in Iraq was to disband the Iraqi army and security forces. The state machinery was dismantled. Direct imperial rule seemed feasible to ...”

“... Even Pindar, Horace and Ovid threw down the gauntlet to oblivion: come and get me if you can. Paul Farley and Michael Symmons Roberts are poets and professors of poetry, and the authors of a previous collaboration, Edgelands, which took as its subject the dejected spaces that buffer suburban developments, industrial parks, highways and airports. They have ...”