“... this volume lacks any obvious raison d’être, it is because this heterogeneity is made all the more conspicuous by their appearing between the same hard covers. In fairness to Elinor Shaffer, the editor, it should be said that she has tried to give some idea of all that ‘comparative literature’ today embraces. So, too, has Paula Clifford in her ...”

“... Minimalism and the many lesser eddies all conscientiously described by Harold Osborne) is no more useful as a term than Romanticism or Classicism have been in helping us to understand the art of the past. John Russell, meantime, in his new book, Meanings of Modern Art, is a little bolder. He begins conventionally enough with Manet and the ...”

“... ages is, he suggests, a gross oversimplification, and in its place he seeks to provide a richer, more nuanced analysis, albeit one drawn almost exclusively from printed sources and from such secondary accounts of limited portions of this territory as we already possess. On the whole he succeeds admirably, and the vigour of his prose, his skills at synthesis ...”

“... become well known too, and perhaps it has lodged in people’s memories because it is something more than merely droll: it is rather sad. Under what circumstances might a wedding cake be left out in the rain? Something farcical but catastrophic must have happened, the marquee collapsing or the bride absconding – just the sort of ominous, unexplained ...”

“... summer), but its founder remains an elusive figure: the Bond villain of the modern Scottish scene. More than a garden, Little Sparta was intended as a martial state – Finlay designed stamps for it, and a flag – and with a machine gun emblazoned on its entrance it did not seem overly keen to welcome visitors. When a Strathclyde Regional Council sheriff ...”

“... these islands, but which sometimes exerted an influence on British diplomacy and high culture. Far more complicating – because it went on for much longer and all social levels were ultimately involved – was the impact of runaway formal and informal empire. By the 1820s, a fifth or more of the world’s population, in ...”

“... required’. For his son, public school, at Sherborne, was followed by four years reading, or more often not reading, classics at Oxford from 1923 to 1927. Friendships formed at Oxford in the 1920s seem so pervasive in the literary life of interwar Britain that we may be in danger of forgetting how small the actual numbers were: Day-Lewis was one of just ...”

“... dismissed as classics and … largely unread due to the effort involved in reading and turning any more than two hundred pages’. The context of this passage is a harebrained scheme to freeze sound by the Frigicom process, using liquid nitrogen, so that noise pollution can be frozen at source and disposed of safely at sea. These books have safely been turned ...”

“... Rotherhithe’. He stalked twilight zones, dowsing for echoes of Conan Doyle, Arthur Machen and Thomas De Quincey. We are commuters, he wrote, ‘struck by a quarantine whose extent escapes our measuring instruments’. After wartime displacement to Bordeaux, and the horrors of typhoid, he returned to a shuttered Antwerp, drained, estranged from ...”

“... Tenth also showed up at various times. The First and the Ninth came back at season’s end, while Thomas Hampson sang the complete Mahler songs. Each of the major works, then, was performed at least once, and it wasn’t even an anniversary year. Beethoven’s little things, by contrast, received, by my count, seven performances – by the Philharmonic and by ...”

“... say republican, education at Christ’s Hospital in the City of London, where he was a friend of Thomas Barnes, a future editor of the Times, and a younger contemporary of Lamb and Coleridge. John and Leigh Hunt brought a new idealism to English journalism when they launched the Examiner in 1808. At a time when most polite journals were still tied to the ...”

“... read except [Sarah] herself; if I had thought so, I give you my word, I shou’d have been much more reserved both in that and in the other letters I wrote to her … I shall write to her for the future as I preach to my Congregation, good wholesome serious sound matter, such as may please the eye of a watchful Parent. Private letters were often read aloud ...”

“... writing, had himself rigorously and regularly and most redundantly bled, and refrained from eating more than would keep a starving man alive. Keats had trained in surgery, treated consumptive patients and nursed first his mother during the consumption that killed her and then his brother Tom. Though not well understood or treatable, the symptoms of what we ...”

“... have as rich a tale of human relations and mental worlds as any reader or viewer could stomach. We more or less know about Nietzsche, but Elisabeth, the little sister and living embodiment of everything the mad philosopher disdained, who took control of her brother’s thought, should not on any account be overlooked. Her life is a story of mediocrity ...”

“... as ‘some specimen cases’ (as one entry from 1863 has it): ‘In one of the hospitals I find Thomas Haley, company M, 4th New York cavalry – a regular Irish boy, a fine specimen of youthful physical manliness – shot through the lungs – inevitably dying – came over to this country from Ireland to enlist – has not a single friend or acquaintance ...”