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“... ensured the deaths of half a million children, among other consequences. In her excellent book Joy Gordon charts these in horrifying detail, while providing a rigorous examination of the alibis and excuses given by sanctioneers at the time and since: the suffering was entirely due to Saddam Hussein’s obduracy; supplies of food and medicine were ...”

“... to other gay writers in a similar way. He assigns his students Frank O’Hara ‘primarily for his joy, his freedom from guardedness and guilt’. But Greenwell’s own qualities aren’t necessarily those of his idols. Although he describes gay sex with total candour, the narrator’s pleasure is usually ambiguous and always short-lived: ‘Sex had never been ...”

“... each containing more than its predecessor – in 1922, 1937 and 1979. The first was edited by Gordon Bottomley, the poet whose epistolary friendship was the source of great sustenance to Rosenberg and to whom his sister, Annie Rosenberg, entrusted the task; the second by Bottomley and Denys Harding (of Scrutiny fame); and the last by Ian Parsons. This was ...”

“... to fight against her selflessness as we would fight against a deadly disease’. The ‘great god Gordon’ Lameyer, a tall, handsome, American-jawed – I might as well say it – hunk, arrived in spring 1953, along with acceptances of three poems by Harper’s (though they didn’t take ‘Mad Girl’s Love Song’), and the news that she had won a stint as ...”

“... for existence requires an attention we wouldn’t agree to if we understood its scope.’ For Gordon’s compulsively equivocating narrators, ‘ordinary life’ is a baffling country for which they must keep drafting provisional maps even though the topography forever shifts, resisting categorisation and dissolving its own signposts. The narrators keep ...”

“... Dream Bride Which Is Of Course My Mother but Not with a Vagina Please’, though the Smiths, like Joy Division, are never mentioned directly (Joy Division appear briefly in the appendix). This might be because they are too obvious, too famous, too thinly spread for an encyclopedic mind like Keenan’s to reference (he is ...”

“... show starts rolling again, all totally without significance. There can be no true tragedy or true joy in a world that is so repetitive. We try to fill these credibility gaps with painting, bits of ordered chaos; and music, noises hung on a line to dry. And love. Such a homily would not look out of place in a Vonnegut novel, where a long lens is trained upon ...”

“... happen to them. In places the words get the bit between their teeth and run off on an autonomous joy-ride. All the same, we are securely situated in a time and a place: the time the first half of the present century, the place St Botolph’s, a small New England town. At the start, St Botolph’s is so securely tied to its past and its ingrained, unexamined ...”

“... having a Wile E. Coyote moment: it was a year after the crash and nearly two since Northern Rock; Gordon Brown had been pushed to open the Chilcot Inquiry, established to investigate the behaviour of his predecessor in the run-up to the Iraq War; and the best-known Mark Fisher was Tony Blair’s former arts minister, the Labour MP for Stoke-on-Trent Central ...”

“... about her past self – apart from not recalling just when things happened – let alone by joy, but Stewart finds both in days long gone, as all good composers of memoirs should. He makes himself amusing for our benefit, as Randall Jarrell, in a somewhat different spirit, made Mary McCarthy amusing for us as Gertrude Johnson, in Pictures from an ...”

“... oak kept young and vital by varnish) may also realise Brancusi’s sole intention, ‘to bring joy’, and he’s abetted by its accessibility, a vexing issue in regard to Modernism’s afterlife. How often is Ulysses read beyond the classroom? Have you ever noticed how most museum-goers don’t stop in front of Picasso’s dense, brown-hued Cubist ...”

“... than he should for the good of his art: but the point is that though he often sets to work without joy in his heart, ‘joy does come in the course of working.’ The strength of the Northern craft tradition is that its cult of manual skill enables the craftsman to be excited and indeed uplifted by his own skill as he ...”

“... passenger-list which includes Dante is framed in Prufrockian mannerisms: I recognised them all: Gordon Pym, Jerome the stoker, who never uttered a word, Miss Taussig, Guggenheim (copper and tin), Engels (textile), Ilmari Alhomaki, Dante – I was cold and afraid. This is the prescribed Anglo-Laforguian way of glimpsing the Eternal Footman (‘And in ...”

“... a celebrity cook. Not just how to cook a mushroom risotto like Jamie Oliver or Nigella Lawson or Gordon Ramsay or Anthony Bourdain, but what it’s like to be Jamie or Nigella or Gordon or Tony: Happy Days with the Naked Chef, How to be a Domestic Goddess, In the Heat of the Kitchen, Kitchen Confidential. And then – as ...”

“... is ‘a very clever guy’ and José María Aznar ‘a tough guy’ (a mark of approval). Only Gordon Brown – ominously for him – is ‘a strange guy’. Other character assessments are equally breezy. ‘She is a great person, Tessa [Jowell], just a gem.’ Mandela can be ‘fly as hell’. Princess Anne ‘does a huge amount of largely unnoticed ...”