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“... For the British, South America is perhaps the darkest of the continents: only rarely and faintly has it entered our history, provoked our armies, disturbed our empire and commonwealth. ‘Ford Cortina,’ said the late Poet Laureate, rather sniffily: ‘it sounds like a South American.’ We can’t easily imagine what it’s like to be one: their fiction is obscured by the charms of Magical Realism ...”

“... Dickens laughed, ‘the surprise of it was like the change in a whitebeam “when a gust of wind shivers it to silver”.’ Not bad for an old man in the course of two hours’ chat. Hardy (reported in what sounds like a broadcast – bibliographical data are skimpy) obligingly asked: ‘Do you think if I lived in London I would become clever, too?’ Among ...”

“... In 1968, the Sunday Times ran a competition to translate Baudelaire’s sonnet ‘Spleen’, with George Steiner as judge. Steiner found himself receiving ‘fantastically mottoed’ envelopes from a variety of increasingly improbable authors and sources, all in the same green ink: W.H. Laudanum, Kenelme Sexnoth Pope, H.N. (Helga Nevvadotoomuch, c/o Lord ...”

“... Jewish suspects were John Pizer, a shoemaker known as ‘Leather Apron’; Severin Klosowski alias George Chapman; Michael Ostrog, described by a police investigator as ‘a mad Russian doctor and convict, and unquestionably a homicidal maniac’; and Joseph Isaacs. A few brief sightings of the Ripper, of varying reliability, concur in certain aspects: a man ...”

“... enthusiasm as Hampson, showing him calling implacably for the death of Louis XVI and sending shivers of joy through the ranks of a Convention whose favourite speakers up to this point had been des parleurs, des prêcheurs, des pédagogues. Ici, c’était un tyran. But by the time Saint-Just goes to his execution, Michelet has clearly fallen under his ...”

“... of a royal house guest, the stage-struck Edward Augustus, Duke of York, the younger brother of George III. It seems that Foote, in his cocksure way, had been boasting his prowess as a horseman. As some kind of test or wager he was given one of the duke’s most ‘mettlesome’ stallions to ride. At the first touch of the spur the horse reared ...”

“... a great fool for being detected’), but the operation was another successful exercise in sending shivers down the spines of the respectable classes and in justifying further acts of repression.The third and most famous would-be insurrection, launched in 1820 from a dismal stable in Cato Street, just off the Edgware Road, was an even more scandalous ...”

“... in Wind’ (which is again – at the first level – about trees and reveries) is to send shivers down my spine. It is, to my mind, a great poem, one of the deathless poems of the language, and one of the many curious things about it is that it was written by Timothy Steele when he was an undergraduate – it was, in fact, the first poem by himself ...”

“... imagining than most. Post-colonial? Not really – we are re-colonised over and over. Wall Street shivers, the Australian dollar gets pneumonia; Japan revises its shopping-list, and our coal industry verges on collapse. Britain’s hold began to loosen after World War Two, but our cultural colonisation by the United States was probably effective at least ...”

“... Overt, a ‘student of fine prose’, is keen to learn what he can from an older writer, Henry St George. Early in the story, Overt meets St George’s wife. He ‘would never have taken the important little woman in the aggressively Parisian dress for the domestic partner of a man of letters’, James writes. Such wives ...”