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“... a ballad called ‘Out of the East’ we learn that the sun in those parts shone ‘as the blood rose on the day’: And it shone on the work of the warrior wind And it shone on the heart And it shone on the soul And they called the sun – Dismay. The poem ends with the same information, now doubly delivered: And they called the sun Dismay, my ...”

“... someone who understands that public speaking is an art involving precise preparation: ‘I used to mark up the text with my own special code, noting pauses, stress and where to have my voice rise or fall.’ There are the clothes: that ability constantly to re-invent her appearance which being female allowed her. Though being a woman and middle-aged also meant ...”

“... Our relatives were more likely to be an embarrassment, not a recommendation. The query with which Mark Boxer, usually lying on the floor, was later to unnerve insecure talents seeking work from the Sunday Times – ‘Tell me who you know’ – was meaningless to us in the Fifties. We had to manage with a landlady and barman as references. No wonder those of ...”

“... Dickens as he did. Long out of print, his life is now reissued by Cambridge University Press to mark Dickens’s bicentenary. John Sutherland has added them up: there have now been at least 90 biographies. Claire Tomalin’s Charles Dickens comes just two years after Michael Slater’s excellent Charles Dickens, the first to benefit from the complete ...”

“... diagrams, for example, of how a horse’s legs move in different gaits and shows how a sweeping mark with the broad side of a piece of chalk can at the same time represent the shape of a muscle and the gloss on a coat – the first seven pages of illustrations are given over to children’s drawings. There is one he did himself at eight-and-a-half of a cart ...”

“... she has herself become part of the story. Her joint biography of Charles and Diana, published to mark their tenth wedding anniversary in 1991, presented a positive picture of a marriage that might not be a love match but was nevertheless a team effort. They were both furious. Diana’s response was to talk to Andrew Morton, whose book, Diana, Her True ...”

“... Garment Workers Union and the Amalgamated Clothing Workers of America (the men’s counterpart) rose from forty thousand to over three hundred thousand. In the Thirties, the ILGWU established ‘joint liability’ in the industry, making manufacturers responsible for the practices of their contractors, and wages and unionisation ...”

“... in French, wang-wang in Chinese. They utter seemingly any monosyllable at all, but imprint the mark of dogdom by always uttering it twice.) Language spoken and overheard can yield complex wonders. This is from the BBC’s Gardeners’ Question Time: ‘When you tie a standard rose and this applies to any standard ...”

“... small men have to be assertive and ambitious if they are to be taken seriously, and Barrie rose to the challenge with fanatical energy. Idleness was not part of the attraction of youth for him. He never stopped working, and he saw through that side of his nature too: ‘There are few more impressive sights in the world than a Scotsman on the ...”

“... unable to sleep the previous night. Broken and disrupted sleep could be a symptom of illness or a mark of being ill at ease: Thomas Bentley, of Turvey in Bedfordshire, consulted the astrologer because he found himself ‘Troubled in his sleepe with dreaming of Children’. To draw the curtains around a bed and prop one’s body against a bolster was to court ...”

“... experience, and which is still used, as it was by Lennon in his work as an artist.In John Lennon, Mark Chapman was to perceive his double. Chapman was a former LSD tripper, programmatically married to a Japanese, capable of signing himself John Lennon and then of harshly revoking the signature: with a face as round as a lens of his hero’s granny glasses, in ...”

“... been called in the course of the game: ‘gay wiz khalifa’ and ‘wayne brady’).&, once, the mark of Buddha the year acnescored my forehead with its bumpy faith.o my niggas & my niggas who are not niggasi been almost pissed myself, almost been boxin’been tears & snot off your dozen wondersbeen the giddy swine dancing the flame.o my many hearts, y’all ...”

“... keep a straight face when trafficking in absurdity, though she throws in an occasional exclamation mark, and she is resolutely fair to an exotic who would today be baited routinely. Glyn’s novels, she assures us, ‘continue to inspire readers’, though it is hard to know who these may be. A further glance at the reference shelf shows that Mrs Leavis, in ...”

“... Sensitive Plant’ and ‘The Witch of Atlas’ Shelley ‘takes a common object such as a rose or a boat, and the more he describes it, the less we remember what it is.’ Or to refer, with Leavis, to Shelley’s ‘weak grasp upon the actual’. There is no merit in urging Shelley to buck up and look hard at a ...”

“... pieces of naughtiness and in Craig Raine’s image of an excited watering-can and a peculiar rose – and this is because, more than anything, the blue verse tradition is about being in control – of your verse-form as well as your feelings. There is no room in this tradition for a poem about sexual compulsion such as Ted Hughes’s ‘A Childish ...”