“... Peter Redgrove had a secret. It was called ‘the Game’. Sexual in nature, this obsessive ritual ignited some of his most arresting poetry, and was vital to his personal mythology for sixty years. Known only to his lovers and a few in his inner circle, the Game has now been made public in Neil Roberts’s remarkable biography of the poet, published almost a decade after Redgrove’s death, along with a new Collected Poems ...”

“... a memoir of adolescence he has written.’ Swallow is a novel to be discussed by lecturers, not read for pleasure. To ginger up his non-story, D.M. Thomas introduces post-Chatterley musings (give them an inch and they’ll take an ell) which do indeed look like improvisations, straight from the stream of consciousness. Here is a Russian at the ...”

“... Italy. Carpenter, predictably, finds the three essayists – Richard Humphreys, John Alexander and Peter Robinson – ‘taking a rather solemn approach to the whole thing’; whereas, he assures us, Pound’s exertions on behalf of these arts partook ‘more than a little of the amiable joke’. Before it is through, Pound’s centenary year will bring on ...”

“... a foreign country, where things are differently done. I had not encountered the Tennessee novelist Peter Taylor before, and this book came as something of a revelation. As a writer he has the gift, which seems both wholly natural and yet to go with a very conscious discipline and decorum, of putting the reader calmly inside his world in his first few ...”

“... which, I believed, were flown to Fakenham for me by aeroplane. My mother was teaching me to read, for I was her chief distraction from the war. When she wasn’t listening to the wireless or writing her daily letters to my father, she and I were playing alphabet cards – sounding out the letters and making words. Cat, mat, hat, sat, rat, fat. Pretty ...”

“... passage of the book he concludes that Freud, the son of a merchant from Moravia who went on to read medicine, and his followers, ‘could hardly help being Jewish, for their career plan in the Viennese context was a Jewish one’. The statistics, then, answer one question: how Jewish was the Viennese middle class? They do not, of course, answer the more ...”

“... why one might take up his scholarship or his fiction are not the same as those that make us read Mimesis or The Greeks and the Irrational – books that transformed, and continue to influence, our understanding of significant problems in European intellectual and cultural development. The worlds to which Tolkien’s writings take us are the old ...”

“... is that these are visions of a place far off in time, a world imagined through what has been read as much as constructed from what has been seen.Turner’s and Constable’s heightened response to weather resulted in sketches of clouds and skies made with near scientific objectivity. They were at it early on, too early for the Ruskinian intuition that a ...”

“... might share more than the accident of the way flesh hangs on bone is the fact that Dylan, too, read Rimbaud and Baudelaire and that Munch’s images, particularly his early ones, were contributions to the general end-of-the-century Symbolist inflorescence – in 1896 he even worked on illustrations for Les Fleurs du mal. In some of the pictures on show at ...”

“... which he handled the medium – it seems to give a rather soft subject bite. It is interesting to read, though, in Lloyd Goodrich’s book on Hopper, that when they were first shown the general reaction from critics and public was that they were satire. ‘We were not,’ he writes, ‘used to seeing such commonplace, and to some of us ugly, material used in ...”

“... the desire to restore it seems both heroic and quixotic: an act justified only by perfect faith.I read Richard Goy’s Venetian Vernacular Architecture – mainly about traditional housing in the lagoon but a wonderful introduction to Venetian building in general – and lying in my hotel room, looking up at the high ceiling, I knew that the ...”

“... the lower and upper shelves of dimly lit cases like the dusty bottles and books no one is going to read which clutter high places in theme pubs. The perfunctoriness of some of the labels here (where and when was the bird collected? What does the inscription say?) indicates that the history of the objects themselves is not quite the point.The character of the ...”

“... of Ivon Hitchens’s acreage, on the other hand (it was more managed woodland than garden), can be read in his paintings. The large brushstrokes have much in common with those of Howard Hodgkin, but are closer to things seen. Even if you can’t be sure a slab of white is light reflected off water or broad patches of grey are single leaves or whole trees, you ...”

“... of one of Bridget Riley’s prismatically divided, coloured abstracts. But these images do not read as flat surfaces; they are accounts of a three-dimensional world. The field is divided into shards and lozenges: the faceted forms of Cubist painting combine with the angled lines and rectangles of the Russian Suprematists. You identify, quite quickly, what ...”

“... to have made possible, almost accidentally, an art of pure painting. While Vermeer may have been read by his contemporaries as a moralist (what we think of as a sleeping woman was seen as a warning against drunkenness, while the woman with the scales may have been thought of as an admonition to live a balanced life), we turn to them – rightly or wrongly ...”