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“... so. Perhaps we are in the realm of that more general, sexually innocent homoeroticism discussed by Paul Fussell in The Great War and Modern Memory (1975) or in Martin Taylor’s less fashionable, less thesis-driven anthology, Lads, republished in 1998. In Taylor’s collection, so often are the poems bad, unaware (Ronald-like?) or puny that the best among them ...”

“... sonnets, his most famous and least typical poems, which had just been praised by the dean of St Paul’s for their ‘pure and elevated patriotism’. Churchill’s threnody to an already mythical soldier-poet appeared in the Times three days after his death: ‘Joyous, fearless, versatile, deeply instructed, with classical symmetry of mind and body, he was ...”

“... Moore sinks to his knees straightaway and prays for a considerable period of time, and Piers Paul Read similarly. Some admiration for this, men who pray in public not uncourageous, though more often met with at Catholic rather than Anglican services. The service is conducted by Father Kit Cunningham who talks about Anna, saying how she had summoned him ...”

“... or two, the people wake up, and the ship of state slowly rights itself. The British historian Paul Kennedy, in The Rise and Fall of the Great Powers, published in 1987, offers a very different view. This is not the story of twenty to thirty-year cycles of intervention and laissez-faire, but of two to three hundred-year cycles of imperial ascendancy and ...”

“... for not ignoble victims of a natural instinct reputed vicious in the modern age’. As with St Paul, hate and love of the persecuted were closely bound up. Symonds speaks of the personal misery flowing from the Vaughan affair in striking vocabulary: ‘It was a severe strain upon my nervous and moral strength – this probing of Vaughan’s case, this ...”

“... could.’ This was the sketchy outline I carried with me to New York on a trip, with the producer Paul Quinn, to research a radio programme about the Beat heritage. I’d never been there before, never met Corso. I’d seen him, in the tweed sports jacket of a young academic, performing, sober, at the famous Albert Hall ‘Wholly Communion’ readings on 11 ...”

“... laps at the New Orleans Athletic Club, and nightly Brandy Alexanders at Victor’s around the corner. But mortality was the thing that drove him. ‘Without that idea of imminent death,’ he remarked, ‘I doubt that I could have created Blanche DuBois.’ Throughout his life Williams insisted that he worked every day, by which he meant every day, seven ...”

“... clappy’ evangelical meetings in church halls. Helen remembers her parents going round the corner to the neighbour’s house to watch the TV news that summer. On 12 August 1969 the Battle of the Bogside began in Derry and trouble soon spread to Belfast. Nationalists rioted and attacked the police, while loyalists burned Catholics out of their homes. In ...”

“... of her reports from Chechnya have been published in English – A Dirty War (2001) and A Small Corner of Hell (2003); they were followed by Putin’s Russia (2004) and A Russian Diary (2007), which give an acerbic account of Russia’s domestic scene (though here too the war in Chechnya is never far from the surface). Nothing but the Truth is based on a ...”

“... asks him how much Zweig shelled out for lunch. ‘Two and six,’ Brecht replies, a Lyons Corner House or something (and at the time the multi-millionaire Zweig was residing in Portland Place), and then it’s straight back to discussion of the revolution.Further west, in Princeton, or much further, in Pacific Palisades, Thomas Mann and his family ...”

“... many of them left-leaning intellectuals, and the story of their ‘duping’ is familiar from Paul Hollander’s Political Pilgrims (1981). David-Fox makes it a more complicated and more interesting story, with the West seen bamboozling the Kremlin while the Kremlin bamboozles gullible Westerners; the Soviet side is no longer a monolith but includes a ...”

“... swimsuits, cocktails and jazz – at times Scott Fitzgerald is staying at the hotel down the road. Paul Rosenberg, Picasso’s canny, conservative dealer, backs up the big spending, encouraging him to trot out easy-on-the-eye charmers to keep Olga in Chanel couture. Not long after the return to Paris, however, the need arises to bring another literary ...”

“... stoical insouciance of people who’d remained. The administration on the run was now headed by Paul Reynaud, a maverick conservative whose Churchillian instincts were never likely to prevail. Reynaud declared Paris an open city, but it was of no consequence for the many who’d already left and those who were scrambling out at the last minute. Hanna ...”

“... touched with a characteristic Hrabalian oddity: ‘In the little pub overhanging the river, in a corner by the window, I was reading. You were weeping, I too was weeping and the tubby landlady was weeping.’ In the early 1950s, he was a member of an underground literary group run by the poet Jiri Kolar. His poems had now become stories, but he did not ...”

“... savage passes through Tahiti, from Rousseau by way of Banks and the besotted crew of HMS Bounty to Paul Gauguin.And there were much gossiped about passages of dodgy behaviour on home soil. Departing on the voyage to the South Seas, Banks left behind a young lady, Harriet Blosset, so convinced he had made a promise to marry that she spent three years knitting ...”