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“... World War poetry cannot do without reference back to that of the First; and it’s true that Keith Douglas was always conscious of Isaac Rosenberg behind his shoulder, Alun Lewis of Edward Thomas. But the idea of modern warfare as one thing and of poetic response to it as another seems, in retrospect, almost Churchillian in its fixedness. Back then, although ...”

“... and conference rooms. It can seldom take a simple, united stance on the great issues of the day. It does its best to explain itself. The European Commission has information centres in London, Edinburgh, Cardiff and Belfast. Every telephone directory in Britain gives the number of its London Office, whose library welcomes visitors and whose publications ...”

“... to have one named after him for fear it would blow up and diminish his reputation. According to Douglas Botting, he likened the airship to a new kind of floor covering which ‘looks marvellous, shines for ever and never wears out’, but cannot be walked on with nailed shoes or have hard things dropped on it, because unfortunately it is made of high ...”

“... and unforgiving’, he tried to conjure some picture of what it might have been like, day by day, for a combatant in 1917. His sense of fellow-feeling came through. When Fussell joined the US Army in 1943, he was an adolescent with vague but rigid notions about military glory, fighting the good fight and ...”

“... on provoking. Eden was an impossible fusser, pestering ministers with as many as twenty notes a day and ringing them up at every turn: Selwyn Lloyd had to endure thirty calls over the Christmas weekend of 1955. On top of this he had a violent temper. Civil servants were scared of taking issues to him: ‘they knew it would worry him and cause an ...”

“... Habbakuk, and on to the forecasting staff tasked with finding a suitable date, weather-wise, for D-Day. Foden’s version of events here sticks fairly closely to the historical record. His chief players are Charles Douglas, a nervously afflicted, pragmatic British meteorologist, the scientifically minded Norwegian Sverre ...”

“... can write plangently about migraine-induced writer’s block: My heid did yak yester nicht, This day to mak that I na micht. So sair the magryme dois me menyie, Perseing my brow as ony ganyie, That scant I luik may on the licht. (My head ached last night so that I couldn’t write today. The migraine oppresses me so badly, piercing my forehead like a ...”

“... America’s intellectual élite and ensure runaway sales. The Supreme Court Justice, William O. Douglas, in a comment for Houghton Mifflin, called Silent Spring ‘the most revolutionary book since Uncle Tom’s Cabin’. It was selected by the Book of the Month Club and Douglas introduced it in the Club News as ‘the ...”

“... at least clear. A human action was assimilated to an eclipse and the promise was that we would one day be able to account for the one, as celestial mechanics enabled us to account for the other. Though Schegloff would deride the boast, it is left unclear what kind of ‘scientific’ knowledge of ‘entitlement to experience’, ‘tellability of a ...”

“... For me literature has never been anything but a means of liberation.’ ‘Liberation’ from his day job as a civil servant; from routine and comparative poverty; from having to frequent people whom he didn’t want to be with. Literature was a transaction: Maupassant on another occasion described himself as a marchand de prose, happy to sell his wares to ...”

“... deal by a crooked mayor who was later murdered. We still don’t know what to think about General Douglas MacArthur; almost all of us, it seems, would rather forget him. Except writers. There have been more than a dozen biographies of MacArthur. Part of the fascination is his contradictoriness: could the same MacArthur really have been a military genius, a ...”

“... in his movies – by George C. Scott, James Mason, Peter Sellers, George Macready, Kirk Douglas, Nicole Kidman, Sterling Hayden; and in smaller roles, Slim Pickens, Peter Ustinov, Sue Lyon, Leonard Rossiter, Shelley Winters, Sydney Pollack – but there is never a trace of ensemble feeling. The actors, and for that matter the characters, are ...”

“... been interested in astronomy and planets,’ says Eagar. ‘I devour the Nasa website to this day.’ Moonwalking and cricket both involve men in white, and both take time, but cricket is a game in which the action is typically of an instant. If you’ve taken the trouble to deconstruct action that takes place in slow motion, it might help inform the eye ...”

“... Throughout this book, the poet Douglas Dunn provides epigraphs and quotations. His final contribution occurs in the last section, ‘Epilogue: The Last Day’, a sort of diary of what Tom Nairn did and felt on the unforgettable rainy Thursday of 6 May 1999. It was the first polling day for the reconvened Scottish Parliament ...”

“... spectacle. But then neither is the squealing of toffs when they feel put upon. Only the other day, Charles Moore (Eton, Cambridge, Spectator, Telegraph) compared Old Etonians to persecuted Jews. Both the pulling and the squealing point to a society in distress, to a sense of national claustrophobia, to a place where too many closed doors promote envy ...”