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“... the process of myth-making, and the psychological and literary needs that process served. Though Robert Browning especially would have resisted the idea, the Brownings’ courtship seems ideally suited to our current preoccupation with the priority of language over experience. These were lovers who read long before they saw one another, who admired writing ...”

“... all come out and it is time for me to begin that journey which will be simultaneously a voyage of self-discovery and an investigation of the state of England. I take the tube to Camden Town and from there walk over to the central avenue which runs along the edge of the Zoo. Nervous about venturing on strange territory, I consult the notice-board which ...”

“... ending, where the themes of the novel seem to be left to drift, and the narrator obtrudes a bit self-consciously by bringing things to an end at the moment of his birth. What I most admire in the novel are particular insights and particular conjunctions. ‘And so I am jealous of every detail in any of those carriages in which she sat, all the more so since ...”

“... like Sir Richard Burton, Lord Cromer, T.E. Lawrence, Gérard de Nerval and Renan, all good for self-damning soundbites, but whose influence on serious academic study of the history, languages and religions of the Middle East was pretty negligible. One cannot understand Lewis’s intellectual formation without looking at the more weighty academic ...”

“... Best known​ for his short prose sketches, the idiosyncratic Swiss writer Robert Walser (1878-1956) liked to call himself a ‘craftsman novelist’, cobbling together ‘a long, plotless, realistic story’. He insisted that his varied sketches – prose poems, portraits of friends and strangers, detailed accounts of walks through the city or countryside, stray bits of literary or art criticism, oddball fantasies – were actually fragments of a single work, which ‘might be described as a variously sliced up or torn apart book of myself ...”

“... a life-story with a distinctly Shandian turn, but one that is also a serious inward quest and self-examination. These different departments are juxtaposed or merged with dazzling fluency – the verve, the apparently spontaneous resourcefulness of the tale are amazing – and up to a point the fact that all this throws up ambiguities and puzzles for the ...”

“... to feminist eyes, of the title’s construction, just a passing knowledge of the dynamics of Robert Maxwell’s ego would seem to preclude the possibility of having the one while being with the other for 47 years. Yet, when one has read the book, it becomes clear that the colon is, after all, perfectly placed between the two propositions, and that the ...”

“... was subsequently driven off the centre pages by Kristallnacht and the Jewish pogroms in Germany. Robert Kee’s book has its origins in his commemorative TV documentary and the book by Robert Shepherd, producer of Channel 4’s A Week in Politics, reads like the script of another documentary. ...”

“... Here was a then-regular sodality, consisting at different times of Kingsley Amis, Bernard Levin, Robert Conquest, Anthony Powell, Russell Lewis and assorted others, and calling itself with heavy and definite self-mockery ‘Bertorelli’s Blackshirts’. The conversational scheme was simple (I think it had evolved from a ...”

“... verse that spanned Scots, English, Gaelic and Latin, Muir wrote in ‘Scotland 1941’, a poem of self-lacerating denunciation, that Burns and Scott were ‘sham bards of a sham nation’ where extreme Protestantism had led to ‘No pride but pride of pelf’ (the archaic noun ‘pelf’ is an example of the antiquarian diction and cadences that dog even his ...”

“... was William Camden’s ponderous official history, then the influential courtier biographies by Robert Naunton, Froude’s probing critique, the rigorous constitutionalism of A.F. Pollard, and so on to John Neale, his pupils and colleagues, and beyond to Peter Lake and John Guy. So often studies of Elizabeth’s reign are impossible to disentangle from the ...”

“... the given life, where your possibilities seemed to be no more than the sum of your predicaments. Robert Frost called it ‘a momentary stay against confusion’ and also ‘a clarification’, and it is in this experience of the poem as a personal way of knowledge as well as a psychosomatic process that every poet’s reward must ultimately ...”

“... Before printing, actually, in the days of scrolls and tablets: what is the Bible if not a self-help manual? William Caxton got in on the act early enough with The Game and Play of Chess Moralised (1474), a book which aimed to make people better than they used to be, not by bringing their souls nearer to God, but by bringing their pawns closer to the ...”

“... 1914, Tuchman is forced to invent one of her own. The result is a series of eight essays, self-contained, entertaining in themselves, with occasional patches of superb writing, but feebly connected by concepts taken from the period itself: ‘the unconscious boredom of peace’, the desire for combat, and the existence of surplus energies seeking ...”

“... Eton means nothing in this context. Both men have been for most of their lives rich, confident and self-assured. Neither belongs to the aristocracy, though Mr Macmillan married into it. And what does ‘aristocracy’ really mean in a world of endless absorption and assimilation? All this chip-on-the-shoulder fussication about social class, exploited ...”