“... 1933, remembered leaving a café with Pessoa, and walking with him for a few blocks. Hourcade had, Richard Zenith writes, ‘this uncanny sensation: that the poet, as soon as he disappeared around the corner of a downtown street, had really disappeared, and would be nowhere in sight were he to run after him’.In 1934, a year before his death, Pessoa began a ...”

“... to appear, and in his papers there is the larger part of a manuscript for the 16th volume. It may perhaps be edited by Carr’s friend, Tamara Deutscher, with whom he frequently collaborated. Carr began to write his History just after the Second World War, when the Soviet Union appeared in something of a heroic light. The origins of the Stalinist colossus ...”

“... Warren, ‘discovering me about to bed with someone whose name was Partisan Review’. You may believe these institutions create your ambition; they do not. It is inherent, or inborn, or created in you by adversities, luck, love or the lack of it. The real document is already written: her diaries, a biography of aim. In her Journals she wished, with ...”

“... is imperceptible, and those who sacrifice themselves in the interest of imperceptible improvements may not even receive the praise normally due selfless behaviour. The real-world example Olson gave was farmers in the American grain market. If a selfless farmer, worried about the suffering of his colleagues because of depressed prices, decided to lower his own ...”

“... new book, The Grass Is Greener, causes a fatal synaptic meltdown in anyone who reads it, and only Richard Anger, maverick bookseller, and Lauren Furrows, emotionally timid neurologist, can stop the epidemic. Balancing the figure of Gary, for whom subject matter is everything (he admires the Monet on his wall because the artist ‘painted pictures of flowers ...”

“... The response to ‘A Matter of Light’, as the draft was called, was not encouraging. ‘I may be totally wrong,’ Williams’s agent, Marie Rodell, wrote, ‘but I don’t see this as a novel with high potential sale. Its technique of almost unrelieved narrative is out of fashion, and its theme to the average reader could well be ...”

“... and caricatures. The places where he was stationed – Paris, Auteuil, Neufchâteau – may have helped him develop a taste for the Old World illustrations used in parts of Cinderella and Fantasia; he may only have been educated up to the age of 15, but he wasn’t unworldly. In 1920, having returned to a job as a ...”

“... and will drop from the ceiling onto their victims. We are not prepared to say how much of this may be due to popular superstition.’ The report was produced because ‘the infestation of new council houses has become a matter of concern to Local Authorities who are responsible for their maintenance and management.’ Whether bugs became common in these ...”

“... the enemy of churches. The Salisbury diocese has a history of wrong-headed deans. These gentlemen may have been top god-botherers but that was no reason to let them loose on one of the finest buildings in the world (exterior only). Thirty years ago, Hugh Dickinson proposed knocking down a Grade 1 listed wall to admit tourist coaches and so increase revenue ...”

“... occupation and living wage (a black-humoured task dreamt up for my convalescence by the well-named Richard Gott) arrived 22 years late: in 1968 I sent a memorandum to the then editor proposing a daily warts-and-all profile of a man or woman lately dead – in other words, a Not-the-Times obituary column. Now it is universally agreed in the four serious dailies ...”

“... end up on the same side as the Israelis. In America there are many voices – Henry Kissinger, Richard Perle, Congressman Les Aspin, among many others – who are today demanding openly what Eden, in the case of Nasser, and his colleagues could only resolve in most secret conclave: the destruction of Saddam Hussein, the old war aim of Khomeini, and the ...”

“... Oxford’s spell, or under the spell of an Oxford he never quite managed to locate. The young Ved may have been a trifle gauche and smarmy but the old Mehta is quite proud of him. We hear of the boy’s lively debating skills, his conscientiousness, his charm, and we are left in no doubt that, after a somewhat shaky start, he was eventually moving in the ...”

“... chapter on comparative cleanliness which ends with the judgment that ‘France and England may be ranked amongst the tolerably clean nations, England taking the lead: but real cleanliness is not general in either ... The majority prefer a modest degree of dirtiness as being more conducive to their true comfort.’ There is a mass of later secondary ...”

“... New Economic Policy, which rewarded the individual peasant and worker for his or her enterprise. (Richard Pipes’s new hook on the Russian Revolution disagrees, and paints Lenin as the inaugurator of the oppression of the peasants and workers.) The Revolution was betrayed by Stalin, who established the very unsocialist central command economy, with its ...”

“... poems he is never led to those wild shores of psycho-analytically-based allegorical meanings where Richard Wilbur, Harry Levin, Daniel Hoffman and others have happily roamed, finding that the Red Death in the story with that title is the disease of rationalism, that the tarn and the abstract painting in ‘The Fall of the House of Usher’ are expressions of ...”