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“... the landscape is not as bleak as he suggests. Paulin finds room for two such poets, Linton Kwesi Johnson and John Cooper Clarke, though I might not have echoed his choice from the latter: the 82 uses of ‘fucking’ in 50 lines would perhaps be more effective in performance than on the printed page. One of the main difficulties for theorists of an organic ...”

“... from grand old men (Morgan, Donald Davie) to established talents in mid-career (Charles Tomlinson, Douglas Dunn) to new Best of Young British megastars (W.N. Herbert, Robert Crawford). But the fact relevant to Pound’s current standing is the one in Michael Alexander and James McGonigal’s Introduction: Sons of Ezra could not find a British publisher. Pounds ...”

“... in the South are apt to admire the Israelis for trying to maintain it in their fashion. Lyndon Johnson said as he signed the Civil Rights Bill on 2 July 1964: ‘We have lost the South for a generation.’ It has been two generations now, and there is no sign of the South returning. Political control of the region has reverted to the party of Abraham ...”

“... of US military forces in Europe was to discourage ‘the revival of German militarism’. Douglas Lute, the US ambassador to Nato under Obama, was even more explicit. The alliance ‘fundamentally serves a vital American interest’, he said, since in the event of a crisis the US ‘enters that crisis with thirty like-minded, militarily capable ...”

“... Visiting the Columbia campus the following week, the speaker of the House of Representatives, Mike Johnson, suggested the National Guard be brought in to deal with the students, whom he called ‘lawless agitators and radicals’. With their encampment dismantled, the students built another on a different lawn, and occupied a university building; mass arrests ...”

“... if it insisted on everyone’s right and opportunity to sit in cafés. It is not so far from Dr Johnson’s How small of all that human hearts endure That part which laws or kings can cause or cure. Like Johnson, Peterley has inherited a vile melancholy – ‘that very paralysis of will which prevents your voluntary ...”

“... The Chiltern Hundreds, which isn’t rubbish but a well-plotted light comedy written by William Douglas Home, with the legendary A.E. Matthews, Cecil Parker and David Tomlinson. I know the play well, or should, having been in it at school in the Tomlinson part. After a succession of female roles (including Katherina in The Taming of the Shrew), my voice had ...”

“... aspire – got the message.’ AIPAC’s influence on Capitol Hill goes even further. According to Douglas Bloomfield, a former AIPAC staff member, ‘it is common for members of Congress and their staffs to turn to AIPAC first when they need information, before calling the Library of Congress, the Congressional Research Service, committee staff or ...”

“... and censorious, with Mrs Patrick Campbell, and kept a kindness for scapegraces such as Lord Alfred Douglas and Frank Harris, in whose biography of Shaw the subject had interfered so heavily and helpfully. Being rationally opposed to the entire political, social and sexual order of the times, Shaw was professionally candid on subjects such as sex and ...”

“... rival factions in the intelligence community: the ‘tree of smoke’ that, for the novelist Denis Johnson, symbolised CIA operations in Vietnam. I inhaled that smoke myself in 1969-70, when I was a cryptographer with a Top Secret clearance on a US navy ship that carried missiles armed with nuclear warheads – the existence of which the navy denied. I was ...”

“... 20th-century non-linear-dynamical point of view. It’s a funny book, Time Bandits crossed with Douglas Adams. It’s an enormous, systematic study of order and disorder, which moves to the strange, slow rhythms of what historians call the longue durée. Although the bulk of its action seems to happen in North America, it is also about 18th-century ...”

“... Four neighbours – Estelle van der Merwe, Johan Stipp, Michele Burger and her husband Charl Johnson – testified that they heard the unmistakeable voice of a woman before the shots were fired: a woman, more than one of them insisted, who sounded as if she feared for her life. On the witness stand, each of them was adamant that the voice of the person ...”

“... terms in which it was rendered into English by such as Standish O’Grady, Lady Gregory and Douglas Hyde, who became president of Ireland at the time the book was being completed. But it is too easy to make these connections between Joyce and O’Brien and too easy also to misread O’Brien’s regular assaults on Joyce as an aspect of his bitterness or ...”

“... Amis on Larkin as an undergraduate, Charles Monteith on publishing Larkin, Barry Bloomfield and Douglas Dunn on Larkin the librarian, and others) neatly circumambulates the poet, who has made it clear that in a sense life began for him when the good poetry began, at 20 or even 30, and the ‘Toads’ poems probably say as much as one wants to know about the ...”

“... its product offering.’ I heard that the military was developing robot soldiers. I heard Gordon Johnson of the Joint Forces Command at the Pentagon say: ‘They don’t get hungry. They’re not afraid. They don’t forget their orders. They don’t care if the guy next to them has just been shot.’ I heard him say: ‘I have been asked what happens if the ...”