“... all this is about and it dispenses In sheeted fragments, all somewhere around But difficult to read correctly since there is No common vantage point, no point of view Like the ‘I’ in a novel. And in truth No one never saw the point of any. Tell that to Henry James. The sonnet poems of Shadow Train have something of the Jamesian absence of ...”

“... mortally ill. He never saw their publication, nor were they published in Russia: he sent them to Richard Gregory in England. They will appear in Gregory’s Oxford Companion to the Mind. Inner difficulties and outer difficulties match each other here. It is not only difficult, it is impossible for patients with certain right-hemisphere syndromes to know ...”

“... Review, is a canny publicist for herself and her journal. Now, at last, we have this already much-read work to review. The Magic Glass is transparently a version of the author’s childhood, some thirty years ago in Fife (here ‘Skelf’). Before evaluating Smith’s particular achievement in her first novel, it’s worth going a little into the general ...”

“... not much influenced by Gide because, like many thoughtful young people in different centuries, she read older books and knew of contemporary writers only through the modish fuss surrounding them: her Alexis is the same sort of ‘young fogey’, with his old-fashioned style. Galey says Alexis’s style is glacial. No, she says, it is tremulous. ‘People often ...”

“... separately, Kramer’s articles often seem, and sometimes are, cogent and outspoken. When we have read the whole book, however, we can see that his position is muddled, and far less courageous than he would like us to think. Two characteristics of the art of the Sixties and early Seventies agitate Kramer as they must any serious commentator on modern art. One ...”

“... Ladd-Taylor and Umansky – wrote into law many of the recommendations made by Charles Murray and Richard Herrnstein in their book The Bell Curve, in which they charged that single motherhood correlates positively with child poverty and crime, and urged that welfare benefits be taken away as a disincentive to further childbearing. ‘While more affluent women ...”

“... on Francesco Patrizi, though the chances of Shakespeare having even heard of him, let alone having read his unpublished treatise on la maraviglia, seem slender.) Their animus against the rational, though, often seems to have less to do with the Middle Ages than with the New Age. Biester, by contrast, adopts a brisk Madison Avenue manner towards the ...”

“... trade suffered and men died. The anti-war writers were divided between those like the Radical Richard Price, who saw in America only a beacon of liberation from monarchist and colonial oppression, and those who questioned the meaning of liberty in a society where slavery was still legal. Among the pamphlets and essays Johnson published was an early poem ...”

“... to be a language,’ Johns noted in the early 1960s – or, more precisely, a language game. He read Wittgenstein in the summer of 1961, Philosophical Investigations in particular, but already by 1959 he had let colours and names slip away from one another, and in 1960 he superimposed numbers, 0 through 9, to the point of illegibility. With Fool’s House ...”

“... writing, The Sense of an Ending is both extraordinarily lucid and strangely elusive. When I read it again recently, it often seemed like an extended response to a work to which it nowhere adverts – Eliot’s Four Quartets. This curious palimpsest was perhaps motivated by Kermode’s attempt to distance himself from Eliot while accepting the terms ...”

“... actors, including a recommendation that their star player should go to London and try to rival Richard Burbage’s performance as Hamlet) but other countries. There are records of a performance by ‘Englische Comoedien’ in Dresden as early as 1626, possibly of the practicably short first quarto text that lies behind the oldest surviving translated ...”

“... unashamedly reclaiming dignity for the low-life ways of Black proletarians. It’s hard not to read such passages as a swipe at the pretensions of Harlem’s Black bourgeoisie, and of the attitudes of the NAACP, which Du Bois helped found. McKay was determined to portray a version of Black life that, as his biographer Wayne Cooper wrote, was ‘far removed ...”

“... I am waiting​ for a plane at Newark. Time was when anywhere in an airport was a good place to read, or just to go slack and empty, to be nobody in particular and, by that token, more specifically yourself. Now, there are TVs everywhere, placed so that, as I wander out of earshot of one, I come to the next, the news of the latest atrocity or government scandal following me from point to point with all the power and insistence that amplified trivia possess in our time ...”

“... herald hands over a paper, and the King reads: Edward, the Duke of York, the Earl of Suffolk, Sir Richard Ketly, Davy Gam, esquire; None else of name; and of all other men But five and twenty. The French have lost ten thousand, of whom all but sixteen hundred were persons of ‘blood and quality’. There is debate over the degree to which Shakespeare ...”

“... accessories; she did not turn up at all to confer with the visiting US Deputy Secretary of State, Richard Armitage; she sent a secretary out to buy a ring matching one she had mislaid. Things came to a head in January, when an international conference was called in Tokyo to put together an aid package for Afghanistan at which more than three billion dollars ...”