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“... Logorrhoea:​ Charles Olson, Robert Duncan and Robert Creeley were all afflicted with it. I only ever witnessed Duncan’s performances – free-form, extended, mostly improvised soliloquies. The one I remember best was at the poet Carl Rakosi’s house. It was many years ago, but I think he touched on Plato, Beethoven, Milton, Tom Thumb, Lysistrata, the genus Asterias (starfish) and the song ‘Penny Lane ...”

“... context of a rapidly commercialising society emphatically was; and it made womanhood a lightning rod for attitudes to capitalist modernity. What Adam Smith’s pupil John Millar decried as the ‘habits of avarice’ of ‘polished nations’ generated much moral disquiet in 18th-century Britain. People fretted about ...”

“... to remember punk but a neo-hippy these days – recently mentioned she’d been to see Patti Smith, who was touring her 1975 album, Horses, for its 40th anniversary. ‘Patti, yeah! Went to see her at the Roundhouse. Paid £30, which I didn’t think was too bad … Didn’t stay that long, though’ – snip, snip – ‘Went up the front and had a ...”

“... degeneration. Luckily the hearties don’t have it all their own way. Michael Crick’s and David Smith’s book describes how, at the same time as Stan Cullis was assembling his Wolves team, Matt Busby at Manchester United was embarking on a managerial career uniquely committed to attractive attacking football. The triumph’n tragedy saga of United under ...”

“... And here also was a good test, because Thatcher had attacked the two-party consensus on the Smith-Muzorewa deal, suggesting that if elected she would lift sanctions on Salisbury.At once we were in an argument. Of Joshua Nkomo I remember her saying: ‘I think Joshua is absolutely sweet.’ That was the least of our disagreements. On one point of ...”

“... successor in Finchley, Hartley Booth, have left office under a moral cloud. Neil Hamilton and Tim Smith are part of a long Tory tradition. If we throw our minds back to the Thatcher age, various forms of sleaze are associated with the names of Cecil Parkinson, Nicholas Fairbairn and Patrick Nicholls. Leaving aside the proper ‘constitutional’ resignations ...”

“... hectically rhetorical, and too often mawkish or twee. The drawings are very much School of Stevie Smith, but even worse than hers, and the lay-out of the book brings to mind those reactionary underground magazines of the Sixties, where clutter and muddle were the major aesthetic aims. The title, Report to the Working Party. Asylum. Otiose [preceded ...”

“... see, reform of the House hasn’t progressed much beyond the dropping of one gold stick or black rod (or something) from the ceremonial opening of Parliament. In fact, in its approach to the political system and ‘modernisation’, the Blair Government is much more like John Major’s than people have noticed. The attack, both rhetorical and actual, on ...”

“... as his Preface notes, women found inspiration in the work of female predecessors. Kissing the Rod: An Anthology of 17th-Century Women’s Verse (1988), edited by Germaine Greer and others, an anthology which does not modernise the ‘incidentals’, is a valuable supplement to Lonsdale’s collection. To begin in 1700 is to begin in the midst of ...”

“... can’t manage the necessary tonal shift out of what has largely been a comic novel; it’s as if Rod Stewart were to try on Die Winterreise. Indian Killer is in every sense a bigger book than its predecessors: longer and yet tighter in structure, far more ambitious and far less good-humoured. The novel’s initial premise suggests a powerful literary ...”

“... club. So Morgan’s decision to stay outside the gates, to identify with the demon with his metal rod rather than Aeneas and his golden bough, neatly subverts tradition and the wish to be Virgilian. Morgan seems happy to leave greatness to others and to stay on the side of the lively, noisy, monstrous and mischievous. Demon music may not always sound ...”

“... doesn’t work. Totalitarian leftism doesn’t work either.’ The conservative commentator Rod Dreher tweeted: ‘Sounds like he is absorbing the Viktor Orbán lesson.’ Among the speakers at NatCon London was Frank Furedi, the former leader of the Revolutionary Communist Party who currently heads the Brussels branch of a private Hungarian college ...”

“... in attitudes, practices and institutions. As a journalist, he was in trouble from the start. W.H. Smith, by the 1850s a presence at every large railway station, refused to stock the National Reformer, out of a hostility towards subversive publications which the firm has sturdily maintained throughout the succeeding 150 years. In 1868, the attorney-general ...”

“... the end, most judges, bishops, statesmen, continued firmly opposed to any thought of sparing the rod. Two notables who figure in these pages in a very unfavourable light are that fun-loving clergyman, Sydney Smith, and the then unregenerate Tory, Gladstone. George Arthur, governor of Van Diemen’s Land or Tasmania from ...”

“... lugubrious TV cleric, the Reverend I.M. Jolly, to the non-fictional ‘Ferry Reverend’, Angus Smith, whose protest against the introduction of Sunday sailings to Skye in 1965 came to an end when police carted him off the slipway. Such images inspired Tom Nairn’s counterblast that ‘Scotland won’t be free until the last minister is strangled with the ...”