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“... a degree that its ability to influence the BBC’s international news agenda will be diminished. Helen Boaden, director of BBC news, has recently been put in charge of all news operations, including those of the World Service, and has a seat on the BBC’s executive board, its highest level of management. The foreign affairs select committee recommended that ...”

“... extended family of bustled and corseted female cousins ‘like very large empty omnibuses on very small wheels’ offered little sympathy. The worst blight of her upbringing, however, was, by her own account, her mother’s violent temper – the sudden unpredictable rages of which her daughter was the main object. Against the staid routine of county society ...”

“... room as it is, I want nothing to change.’ In an essay written recently for the New York Times, Helen Yglesias describes books as the means by which she escaped from an oppressive New York childhood. When, in her fifties, she began writing rather than reading them, books formed the means by which she returned to engagement with life’s problems. Sweetsir ...”

“... is implied by the clothes covering it. The book ends with an anthology. It includes a remark from Helen Olcott Bell which should be included in a general challenge issued to those who do not believe salvation can be achieved through small things: ‘To a woman,’ she writes (read ‘man’ as well), ‘the consciousness of ...”

“... forth/with a shoulder-mounted rocket-propelled grenade launcher.’ Teens on ‘Saturday night/in small-town downtown’ are ‘piled/like marsupials in the backseat’s pouch’. An earnest, dull professor ‘read a chapter from his own book:/naptime./He didn’t care when our heads tipped forward on their stalks.’ When not sleeping through lectures, the ...”

“... scansion across the hammered metal of the afternoon sea, a sheet that my right hand steers – a small sail making for Martinique or Sicily. And yet to criticise Walcott for being derivative, or for his showmanship, is both small and mean-minded. (‘Fear of imitation obsesses minor poets,’ Walcott has written, and not ...”

“... dreams in time? Cities, great pools of forgetfulness,’ Murray wrote to her friend, the novelist Helen Anderson. There is something about this sentence, and many of the lines in her poems and letters, that makes us think of what would become the New York School of poetry, and it isn’t surprising that Ashbery should have responded to Murray’s work. That ...”

“... same fate waits inevitably on the man or woman of talent who consigns personality or persona to a small bright box. Clive James provided a clue to his own enduring charm when he said of Malcolm Muggeridge that he was like an old boiler which had come to be loved, not because it could heat the water, but because it went boink boink in the night. It was not ...”

“... The London Review cover was the most spectacular because of its size, but several papers printed small photographs. Time Out offered a pictorial contrast: on the one hand, a particularly youthful and seraphic photograph, and, on the other, an enormous caricatured head gazing narcissistically over a tiny Westminster Bridge at its own reflection in the ...”

“... scholar, and had read widely. He was soon going to literary parties, and met Pound – then ‘a small but persistent volcano in the dim levels of London literary society’ – and through him Helen Doolittle, who later became his wife. It was at a meeting in a bun shop in Kensington that these three were supposed to have ...”

“... of Communism. He recites a short poem he’s written about Oscar Wilde. Just before sunset a small aeroplane flies over, dragging an advertising banner. It says: ‘Havana/Madrid. Lobster Dinner. $15.99’. The conversation in Key West is still about the two US civilian aircraft shot down by Cuban MiGs, the dead Cuban-American pilots and the organisation ...”

“... In​ 2019, all four artists nominated for the Turner Prize – Helen Cammock, Lawrence Abu Hamdan, Oscar Murillo and Tai Shani – shared the award, not at the instigation of the judges but at the request of the artists themselves, who asked to be considered as a collective rather than individual entrants, ‘in the name of commonality, multiplicity and solidarity ...”

“... Osman were in a band called Geoff. In his memoir, Coal Black Mornings, Anderson describes the ‘small-town wannabes’ rehearsing in his ‘dank, north-facing bedroom’ before going out to play gigs in other people’s bedrooms:Sometimes Mat and I would write stuff at his house. Despite a patina of middle-classness, his beginning wasn’t much grander than ...”