“... and pulpitry’; only to end and cancel out his own argument by a series of comminations more sweeping and prejudiced than Leavis at his worst. The damned include, since Grigson is a Little Englander, ‘the mob of Lowlanders who write in Lallans’ (for Hugh Macdiarmid, as for many others, he has a ferocious aversion that is never explained), and ...”

“... of 17th-century political articulacy below the level of political privilege. It was at Putney that Thomas Rainborough spoke for ‘the poorest he that lives in England’, and that he heard, in the pleas of Cromwell’s son-in-law Henry Ireton for the rights of property, ‘nothing at all that can convince me, why any man that is born in England ought not to ...”

“... our shared sentence: ‘I shall be dead.’ The poet A.E. Stallings faces up to the unknown in a more tender voice in ‘Another Bedtime Story’: The tales that start with once and end with ever after, All, all of the stories are about going to bed, About coming to terms with the night, alleviating the dread Of laying the body down, of lying under a ...”

“... G–G recycle their own portraits, varying them dramatically from one work to another. They are more obviously industrious and inventive than Warhol, who would have disdained G–G’s hard work and obvious ambition. Roland Barthes said that it is the human detail in a photograph that always catches our interest or sympathy, but these pictures have no such ...”

“... outcome of these talks is easy to surmise: they will end with all the nuclear powers possessing more nuclear weapons than they did when the talks started. Once I would have worried about this also. Now I look forward to drinking the Perrier water even if the water talks succeed. To speak the truth, not an invariable practice with me, I do not care in the ...”

“... Rococco artist who seems to be Mr Harris’s invention – and the subject of an earlier book – Thomas Robbins the Elder. By the end of the 18th century topography is firmly part of English landscape painting in the work of Richard Wilson, Gainsborough, Constable and Turner, all of whom are represented. The value of this book to architectural historians is ...”

“... American languages; Byron’s ‘Imitation of Macpherson’s Ossian’; Goethe’s Werther; and Thomas Jefferson, who said that Ossian was better than Homer. It was also Ossian by way of Matthew Arnold who structured the Celtic Twilight in-Ireland and Scotland. Despite all this Macphcrson’s texts have been ignored for much of this century, partly because ...”

“... history of eschatology, life after death and the spiritual path explained by a Tibetan guru. Three more are in the New Age style or promoting New Age ideology. There are also essays by Proust and Timothy Leary and some Freudian texts. Between them, these dominate the list and are the most visible volumes of non-fiction in the windows of every ...”

“... conscious of the anachronistic nature of a siege. ‘Medieval?’ the sick Steevens asks. It’s more ancient than that. Sieges are out of date. In the days of Troy to be besieged was the natural lot of man: to give ten years at a stretch to it, why, it was all in a life’s work: then there was nothing else to do ... But to the man of 1899, with five ...”

“... the move was also encouraged by those Met patrons who collect new art and, although the museum has more than six million visitors a year, the prospect of an expanded audience was a prompt too. In addition, the deal gives the museum time to develop new spaces for modern and contemporary art back on Fifth Avenue, which are to be designed by David Chipperfield on ...”

“... it is proper to conclude that Holbein had borrowed them from Kratzer for his new painting; or, more exactly, since it does not seem that Holbein painted all the segments of this picture at the same time, that he has had them put on a carpeted tabletop, along with his job-lot of examples of earthly skills – music, arithmetic, geography – on the bottom ...”

“... After a decade or more dominated by special studies of anonymous or bestselling authors now suitable for academic recovery, Philip Fisher’s Still the New World marks a return in some ways to an older and less suspicious idea of ‘classic American literature’. Fisher is a critic who has written extensively on realist prose and painting, and his new book is a commentary on Emerson, Whitman, Melville, James and Twain, among others, with significant asides on Thomas Eakins and Winslow Homer ...”

“... a small proportion of colleges and universities in the US: generally, those which attract many more applicants than they have available places. Most schools are happy to accept anyone who can meet minimal entrance requirements and pay tuition. The most prestigious private and public institutions, though, are crucibles of competition. In last year’s round ...”

“... the novelist asks a friend to come to Tunbridge Wells, where she will be able to see a figure more ‘grotesque’ even than Beau Nash or Colley Cibber, ‘a sly sinner, creeping along the very edges of the walks, getting behind benches ... afraid of being seen ... Come and see this odd figure!’ – who is of course Richardson himself. Rawson’s ...”

“... firmly fixed on the readers of the magazines he wrote for, in a way that had never bothered the more obsessed and manic genius of Kipling. And so London’s strong men say to their girlfriends, or rather they ‘passionately cry’: ‘Even unto death I shall claim you, and no mortal man shall come between.’ And a handsome fellow he was as he waded among ...”