“... from some kinds of art-photograph, but from the major part of the tradition of photo-journalism. Christopher Killip’s photographs of the Isle of Man have been published by the Arts Council in a volume so beautifully printed that it is a work of craft to be admired in its own right. The pictures sit in the midst of wide ...”

“... as different as the poetry of Carol Ann Duffy, Kate Clanchy or David Kinloch, and the fiction of Christopher Whyte or A.L. Kennedy. Some of these poets and novelists are wary of each other. Jamie recently refused to read with Irvine Welsh because of what she saw as the misogyny of one of his short stories. Yet even such wariness reinforces a sense that these ...”

“... Not long after, the discussion group was disbanded. The gatecrasher’s name, we learnt, was Christopher Hitchens, and he apparently did this sort of thing rather often, being famous for a sort of pyrotechnic brashness. Looking back, one realises that these were entirely apposite qualities for the successful journalist, which is very much what Hitchens ...”

“... Christopher Logue’s War Music is not ‘a translation in the accepted sense’. It’s not clear why, having said this, he should invoke Johnson’s remark that a translation’s merit should be judged by ‘its effect as an English poem’, since Johnson was talking about translations, whereas Logue’s poem is a variety of ‘poetical imitation’ and belongs to a perfectly good tradition of English poems based on or played off against an older (often Classical) original ...”

“... Christopher Nolan’s $250 million action movie version of Homer’s ancient Greek poem is an entertaining way to hide from the high temperatures for a few hours. Nolan’s trademark jumps and twists in the narrative structure are relatively easy to follow, and appropriate for The Odyssey, a narrative of tales nested in tales ...”

“... as sly, as haunted. A cross between Stevie Smith and Beckett: a good-humoured, sweet Beckett.’ Christopher Middleton writes: ‘Well before the 1920s, the text for Walser is a non-thing, as much so as a Cubist guitar or Magritte’s apple (“Ceci n’est pas une pomme”).’* Other comparisons include the composer Satie, the painter Rousseau, the ...”

“... and hysterical. For good measure, he began to make disobliging remarks about mass-educated white-collar workers. ‘They have no manners,’ he wrote in fuddled praise of Lucky Jim (1954). ‘They are scum.’ All told, Maugham’s plans for a serenely grand old age did not work well. From a reputation-consolidating point of view, he’d have done ...”

“... papers). Valerie Eliot has now allowed the entire notebook to be published, superbly edited by Christopher Ricks, whose T.S. Eliot and Prejudice is still the most acute and fine-grained investigation of the vexed question of the place of prejudice in Eliot’s writing.It is impossible to over-praise Ricks’s work in this edition. His annotations draw on ...”

“... infinity – an image which the smaller but more numerous British cemeteries with their rows of white headstones (never crosses) cannot provide. In the centre stands a large basilica and, close by, a tall lantern tower. Both were the work of Louis-Marie Cordonnier who, in prewar days, had designed the Palace of Peace at The Hague. The basilica is vaguely ...”

“... Taylor acknowledges the difficulty: his book is purposefully and explicitly ‘a history of how white Britons have thought, written and acted about slavery’. Rogers attempts to correct for it, but in an unconvincing way.‘There is not one extant autobiographical narrative of a female captive who survived the Middle Passage,’ the African American ...”

“... grasp,’ as he put it, always citing Ambassador ‘Chet’ Cooper, who was the point-man for the White House in these supposed talks. In the LBJ archives, old ‘Chet’ is quoted as saying: ‘He didn’t have peace within his grasp, he was always overly optimistic about it ... The US Administration regarded Wilson at best as marginal, at worst as a ...”

“... the tribe and humanity in general. They were people; everyone else was an unperson. He, the first white man they had seen, especially so. Leaf studied him as he studied her. His body was odd; its shape and colour were wrong. The hair was wrong. Some had said she coupled with a devil, but he had been able to disprove this by gifts and assistance. Even then his ...”

“... a man who interprets the view for him (‘It is the grey-haired mountain. Abyad! Its turban is white’) on a hilltop overlooking Damascus: ‘Will you not be going down to the city?’ the man asked suddenly. He had joined me as I was climbing the hill, and his curiosity had not been satisfied. ‘How long do you stay in Damascus?’ ‘I don’t ...”

“... these matters his new partner, who has stayed with him for the whole of his business life, Gordon White, boasted to a Sunday Mirror gossip columnist: ‘Why should I marry? I don’t need anyone to look after me. I’ve got a good housekeeper to darn my socks, sew on my buttons and cook my meals.’ White managed to ...”

“... Deirdre Beddoe, Stephen Sedley, Lynette Hunter, Andy Croft, Stuart Hall, Antony Easthope and Christopher Norris. The attacks are now commonplace. Raymond Williams and other writers have been making them for several years. What they amount to is this: Orwell, ostensibly a man of the Left, made his work available to the Cold War wretches on the Right. But ...”