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“... work of a contemporary poet in another language is strictly impossible. What Chana Bloch and Stephen Mitchell have done, however, is to give us enough of the content, complex and difficult as it clearly is, to convince us that we know something of the kind of literary phenomenon Yehuda Amichai is, and to leave us with a little more understanding of ...”

“... rhythmic Richmond Lattimore with a lengthy new introduction;* and three hardback copies of the new Stephen Mitchell translation, with refulgent golden shields on the cover and several endorsements on the back, of which the most arresting is by Jaron Lanier, author of You Are Not a Gadget: ‘The poetry rocks and has a macho cast to it, like rap ...”

“... only person in his audience. A flybill on a street sign promised ‘Ulster’s answer!’ Pastor Stephen Mitchell was proclaiming ‘the glorious gospel’ at John White’s Church on Sunday morning. Pastor Mitchell, who is in his early thirties, spoke of the ‘gross indecency’ of Chaldee in Abraham’s day. ‘Is ...”

“... through it will your heart survive. Be forever dead in Eurydice ... Sonnets to Orpheus, II, 13, Stephen Mitchell’s translation Rilke was born into an ambitious but failing family in German-speaking Prague in 1875. His first given name was René, which he changed to Rainer when he met the extravagant Lou Andreas-Salomé. Before that he had unhappily ...”

“... make up ‘The Heights of Macchu Picchu’, and some later work. It includes strong versions by Stephen Mitchell and Robert Hass (from one of which I have already quoted), and the editor, Mark Eisner. In some cases Eisner has reworked translations by others, notably John Felstiner and Stephen Kessler, and he includes ...”

“... Donald Mitchell recalls that Benjamin Britten had a low opinion of music critics in newspapers. Alan Blyth’s compilation Remembering Britten would have done little to make him change his mind: it is a book fundamentally misconceived and often grotesque in execution. The tributary volume of memoirs, such as the one Stephen Spender compiled after Auden’s death, has the value not only of illuminating its subject but of providing a complex shading of reaction and relation through the personalities of the contributors ...”

“... burden to lay even on such a big animal, and requires some massive scholarly leverage; W.J.T. Mitchell invokes the secular trinity of Darwin, Marx and Freud. He traces the historical origin and development of our ideas about dinosaurs, through evolutionary theory and palaeontology (primarily Darwin and Cuvier), 19th and 20th-century history of ...”

“... film – which, rather mysteriously, refers in the titles to ‘an original screenplay by Julian Mitchell from Oscar Wilde by Richard Ellmann’ – shows a phalanx of unpainted male prostitutes, leaning on some railings. Watching for a cab, Stephen Fry’s Wilde makes eye contact with one of them. ‘Looking for ...”

“... dominant, or most recurrent, styles in American writing have been the rhapsodic and the paranoid. Stephen Fender’s excellent book points directly to what we might call the organising ambiguity of American literature by bringing together in his title ‘plotting’ and the ‘West’. A specific geographical West, to be sure – his (superbly annotated) book ...”

“... foreign policies. In China and the Developing World, Joshua Eisenman, Eric Heginbotham and Derek Mitchell cogently explain why a more confident leadership has chosen to demonstrate its muscle – and its appeal – in parts of the developing world. Many recent books on China’s foreign policy simply list actions without attempting to divine a ...”

“... for the term ‘selected’ is perhaps doubtful. There may be omissions otherwise motivated. Mitchell’s long and informative Introduction says something about Britten’s earlier love affairs, and is candid enough about the rather awful, yet productive relationship with the mother, and the productive one with the permanent lover. Peter Pears had ...”

“... support of the Arvon Foundation, and we were the judges: Basil Bunting, Gwendoline Brooks, Adrian Mitchell, George Barker and myself. I feel vaguely paranoid about any poets but those of my own generation (all dead except for Empson and myself) and was delighted at how well we all got on together. ‘King of the Cats’ (to use Yeats’s phrase about ...”

“... can restore her lost treasures of chaste and delicate thoughts.’ Mr Fried’s other essay, ‘Stephen Crane’s Upturned Faces’, offers no respite from such ‘ravishing atrocities’. While bypassing (though not dismissing) psychoanalytic analysis of the works of the author of The Red Badge of Courage, Fried focuses on some motifs in that work, but ...”

“... the Tory Whips office, in particular by two young MPs, David ‘Two Brains’ Willetts and Andrew Mitchell, whose father, David Mitchell, is also a Tory MP, and once chose Neil Hamilton to be his Parliamentary Private Secretary. The Guardian had told a bit of the story. Parliament had uncovered none of it. And that might ...”

“... language because they’re bound to learn yours. The Conservative prime minister of Canada, Stephen Harper, and the man who on present showing is likely to be prime minister of Australia after September, Tony Abbott, have spoken up for the Anglosphere. In Britain, the Anglosphere is held up as an alternative way to exercise influence in the world by ...”