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“... he said. He became politically active campaigning for Brexit. In a lull in our conversation he read aloud the Bible inscriptions etched on the ceiling. ‘I’m not terribly religious, but the past, the present and the future should all be taken into account,’ he told me. I was happy to chat. I had time to kill: my online application for a press pass had ...”

“... or burlap) inserted carefully behind it, blending colours and textures. It’s tempting to read into these shapes, to see nuptials in the veils, cruelty in the hoops that cleave to the material like corsets, and more so when you consider the phrases Mayer jotted on her drawings or in her notebooks: ‘a cracked egg’; ‘paint dripping thru broken ...”

“... not. Often, batsmen have eyesight that the rest of us do not. David Gower, in his twenties, could read the maker’s name on a mirror. But keen eyesight isn’t enough: to handle fast bowling you need experience of it. Photographers can use lenses to enhance their own eyesight, but as Eagar says, you’ve got to know what you’re hoping to take a photograph ...”

“... regulation or other, consciously or otherwise, or taking advantage of an illegality by others. Donald Thomas’s book reminds a reader that had he been a retired colonel living in Brighton in 1942, and invited an actress from London down for the weekend, he could have been smartly fined and threatened with imprisonment next time. The reason? The coastal ...”

“... besides being one of the most influential, novels of this century. Mr Hamilton simply takes it as read. All that he tells us is that it was originally written in German, that it was translated into English by Daphne Hardy, an English sculptress who was living with Koestler at the time, that she invented its English title, that it enjoyed a great success in ...”

“... Garry Trudeau has put it into Doonesbury. Street vendors in Washington are selling buttons that read ‘I am not Anonymous.’ Primary Colors, the funny, literate and juicy roman à clef about the 1992 Democratic Presidential primary campaign, featuring an ambitious, visionary, greedy, gregarious and womanising Southern governor named Jack Stanton, seen ...”

“... early ones anyway – are now so well established as an ironic commentary on pop culture that they read as decoration, as conventional and period-flavoured in their way as chintz.* The general effect of the show is cool and spacious. You could be in a fashion store which has decided to go retro and jazz up the decor. To see more than decorative wit you must ...”

“... negro streets at dawn looking for an angry fix’ positively bounced with energy when put beside Donald Davie sitting wrapped in his overcoat beside the fire saying Heigh-ho on a winter afternoon. It was possible then to see Ginsberg, Kerouac and their friends as anarchists articulating and exemplifying a morality that flouted the values of liberal Western ...”

“... virtues of the new economic history. I am prepared to wager that this chapter proves the least read section of the two volumes. An excursion into another area of economic theory, by S.Howson, leads the author, while discussing the inter-war slump, to devote some paragraphs to the topic of whether all unemployment should be considered voluntary. At least ...”

“... Writing a BBC Third Programme review of Donald Hall’s Penguin Contemporary American Poetry exactly a month before she killed herself early in 1963, Sylvia Plath praised ‘the inwardness of these images ... the uncanny faculty of melting through the leaves of the wallpaper, through the dark looking-glass, into a world which one can only call surrealist and irrational ...”

“... wife to any husband. The book, though physically attractive and lavishly illustrated, is a hard read. What is it that keeps one going through a long sequence of letters with their arbitrary reference to time and place and their detailed personal content? Usually their literary value and/or narrative arrangement. Vera Stravinsky’s letters have more of the ...”

“... was hardly concerned with Frank Richards as a novelist or (despite his essay’s title) the art of Donald McGill. A better reason for paying attention to humble work is to identify its virtues. At worst, this can become highbrow slumming – overpraising incompetence like an eager nursery teacher or a too-democratic exponent of ‘community arts’. Yet, when ...”

“... in the cabinet has that kind of pull, and the ones who are spoken of in the same manner – Donald Dewar, John Smith – are as dead as the Scottish kings. In the end Sheridan won his case and relieves the News of the World of £200,000. The fate of possible perjurors is still unknown, but it will be some time before the country is so riveted by a ...”

“... field of candidates from any party in history.’ Why, the world wonders, did they end up with Donald Trump as their nominee? The primary voters could have picked Rick Santorum, the former senator from Pennsylvania, once the third-ranking Republican in the Senate, and, with four million votes, the runner-up to Mitt Romney in the 2012 primaries. Santorum is ...”

“... and Gary Snyder on whom Cathay made such an impact, British poets as different from each other as Donald Davie and Jeremy Prynne, Objectivists like Oppen and Reznikoff, and of course the whole group of poets associated with Black Mountain College – Robert Creeley, Denise Levertov, Ed Dorn, Robert Duncan and Charles Olson. Of all these it was Charles Olson ...”