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“... Nine years from now there will be a longish round of spectacular jamborees in Latin America, as its various nations celebrate the bicentenaries of their independence from the Spanish and Portuguese Empires. The cycle will begin in 2010, two hundred years after the opening shots in the Spanish American wars of independence were fired on the bleak plateau of what is now Bolivia ...”

“... In France, we do it lying down,’ a French minister is reported to have said on first seeing the tango. He was not far wrong. The tango crystallised at the end of the 19th century in the brothels of Buenos Aires. It was a dance of prostitutes and pimps, and in its ineluctable rhythms, its belly-to-belly stance, its interlacing of legs, it reflected their professional concerns ...”

“... The result is a panoramic account of 19th-century literary life. ‘Just who were these people?’ Simon Winchester asked in The Meaning of Everything, his 2003 account of the dictionary. Ogilvie follows the paper trail they left, which extends all over Britain, Europe and the Anglophone world.She arranges her chapters, in lexicographical tradition, according ...”

“... In a recent radio programme, Simon Armitage and Glyn Maxwell, two of the most prominent of the New Generation poets, retraced the journey undertaken by Auden and MacNeice in Letters From Iceland – a sign of the renewed interest which younger poets are showing in the poetry of the Thirties. Although Yeats and Eliot were publishing some of their greatest poems during the Thirties, it was Auden who created the style which most of his contemporaries sought to imitate, and it is Auden, more than Yeats or Eliot, who is influencing younger poets today ...”

“... mine without local wayleaves was almost valueless. Tyne traders had a fleet of over three hundred collier vessels for the coastal trade, there were also special ‘keels’ on Tyne and Wear which took the coal down river to these colliers, and the special waggon-ways which got it to the water. This book is a fine reminder of Michael Flinn’s remarkable ...”

“... or the grafting radical introduced by Joseph Skipsey in his 1885 selection. Skipsey, the Tyneside collier poet, who eludes biography, was introduced, many years later, to a public who had forgotten his existence, by Basil Bunting. Journeyman work for both men. Bunting knew exactly what the problem was: ‘A man’s circumstances seldom matter to those who ...”