“... comes from a book, and those books include not only what we call the classics, as private reading or as set books for schools, but a range of leisure reading. Oxyrhynchus was a county town, a sound bourgeois base for schooling. But the classics reached even the remotest corner. Ten days up the Nile by boat, and ...”

“... with rejection was also a motif in her late modernist poetics. In an introduction she wrote for a reading of a late poem, ‘Richard II’, she declared: ‘I believe that at the present time poetry must progress by deliberately trying to defeat the expectations of its readers or hearers.’ But the gesture of making yourself unavailable to the people ...”

“... there in these millennial times ought not to surprise us. This batch of studies finds, in the USA, Peter Plan and T.G. Bishop combing the plays for miracles and James Biester finding the key to Renaissance courtly poetry in its strategies for eliciting astonishment. Back home, Jonathan Bate is gobsmacked by the sheer Genius of Shakespeare. It’s perhaps as ...”

“... a crime story. Both have produced ingenious – indeed, immensely clever – fictions. Hood’s Peter Sinclair, a battered ‘historical materialist’ (aka Marxist) in his sixties, has retired from academic life to a fisherman’s bothie in Scotland where he is preparing a book to be called The Failure of the Avant-Garde, once revolutionary but now merely ...”

“... all political solutions since their power to influence political events was limited. Nor, on this reading, did such power reside elsewhere. The unions were frightened of the employers, the employers obsessed by union power, so that ‘what survived longest in the debris of Weimar corporatism was the image of the enemy.’ In a well-organised appraisal, James ...”

“... crocodile who ate his arm and swallowed a clock. ‘That crocodile,’ Hook announces in Act II of Peter Pan, ‘would have had me before now, but … before he can reach me I hear the tick and bolt.’ ‘Some day,’ retorts the bespectacled boatswain Smee, ‘the clock will run down, and then he’ll get you.’ In the end, of course, time runs out for the ...”

“... of the rise and present institutional character of English Studies. A similar case was argued by Peter Widdowson and his contributors in the ‘New Accents’ volume Re-Reading English. It is hardly surprising that their arguments were met with great hostility by those (not only ‘Leavisites’) who continue to believe in ...”

“... caramel-municipal sheen found in so many offices – opposite four men in suits, one of whom was reading out my letter. It explained that due to the recent death of my father, and the heavy business related to the tidying up of his estate, I had fallen behind in the paying of my taxes. I was truly sorry to have found myself in this position but the last ...”

“... take confirmation in it from the other books under review. Charles Tomlinson’s Annunciations and Peter Porter’s Possible Worlds share Renaissance Virgins for cover illustrations. Tomlinson’s is Lorenzo Lotto’s Annunciation, in which the angel has just leapt spectacularly over the balcony, terrifying the cat, to make his declaration to an overcome and ...”

“... No one reading James Davidson’s enormous and impassioned book, which barely acknowledges the existence, much less the vast numerical superiority, of Greek heterosexual society, would get the impression that Greek homoeroticism was anything less than the central principle determining the varied cultural patterns of all those obstinately independent and idiosyncratic city-states ...”

“... she could handle me. It’s true that she thought I would be going away to boarding school, like Peter. So there would only be the holidays, during which, anyway, she gave up on work to accommodate Peter’s presence. I think she really felt that she could cope with anything, anyone difficult because she wrote about such ...”

“... war, the Holocaust and the tragedy of a young and pointless death was what I was supposed to be reading the diary for, but I was far too engaged with her inner story to pay much attention to the other stuff. Now, of course, reading it from the other end of the age telescope the story looks a little ambiguous. Quite a good ...”

“... both unlikely (a former Methodist seminary in New Jersey) and overdetermined (the University of Reading). But if post-colonialism and women’s studies are anything to go by, no academic discipline can really be said to have arrived until it receives the final mark of legitimacy: a Routledge Reader. At a time when library budget cuts have left the supply of ...”

“... standard book on anarchism. It may not be that, but it was well worth writing and is well worth reading. The book’s title is a partial quotation of one of the Paris graffiti of 1968 – Soyez réaliste, demandez l’impossible. Equally misleading is the subtitle: this is not so much a diachronic narrative or a synchronic analysis as a mixture of the two ...”

“... work now masked by later building and softened by vegetation. The railways have proved adequate. Reading the plans of the St Mary Abbots Hospital, on the other hand, shows how modern welfare has been packed piecemeal onto a site which once announced benevolence more symmetrically. The chapel of 1875 was demolished in 1974; the geriatric wards, psychiatric ...”