“... at the centre of London literary life in the 1930s, a sometimes waspish recycler of gossip and sharp judgments. He now found himself evacuated to Cambridge, exiled from the world that had kept his lively spirit nourished and so, fortunately for later scholars, he and Eliot mostly sustained their friendship by correspondence. These letters show Eliot at his ...”

“... version of a work – say, Hyder Rollins’s Variorum edition of Shakespeare’s Sonnets, or Stephen Booth’s more recent critical edition. Each is a particular attempt to define a comprehensive socio-historical field for the sonnets. Their respective virtues are as much a function of their limits as of their particular strengths, both of which they ...”

“... as he found exemplified by the poet David Jones when visiting him in a Harrow lodging-house with Stephen Spender, and the ‘many lives of pastiche’. But he is aware of the origin of his woes. From 4 October 1953: ‘My deepest problem. I have changed families and at a terrible cost substituted my ideal for my real one’ – an admission of 1994 which ...”

“... of moral fibre). ‘That anybody should be in pain and not be immediately relieved – that sharp pain should ever be inflicted upon anyone,’ bemoaned the eminent Victorian jurist, James Fitzjames Stephen, ‘shocks and scandalises people in these days.’ Assessment, as Rey recognises, is tricky. Does the founding ...”

“... of The Norton Anthology of English Literature’, published in Critical Inquiry in 2009, quotes Stephen Greenblatt’s emails to his Norton co-editors, telling them that Damrosch aimed to include ‘many texts by Welsh, Irish and Scottish writers, to show that multiculturalism, as it were, begins at home’.But in England itself it was too often taken for ...”

“... up to £395,000), this is a tremendous example of aspiration coming to fruition,’ says Stephen Oakes, area director for English Partnerships. Inch by inch, the working canal between Limehouse Basin and the Islington tunnel has become a ladder of glass, connecting Docklands with the northern reaches of the City. Footballers, with loose change to ...”

“... really meant. Moore is famous for the super-real vivacity of her ‘zingers’, brief, sharp, stand-up comedy encapsulations of what her characters, her story, the world as she sees it, are about. ‘Everyone tried hard to be funny,’ the heroine of ‘Agnes of Iowa’ tells her husband, trying to explain why, after seven years away from it, she ...”

“... a man. In a woman all this internal urging is a mistake; it leads to nothing, and breaks loose in sharp utterances and passionate overthrows of conventionality.’ Her own achievements, first as a waspish socialite and later as an unsuitable political wife, seemed to confirm this as a bitter truth; but Virginia’s, now set out cleanly before her, showed that ...”

“... to ‘cronyism’ and ‘orange’ (a reference to the sexual practices of the late Stephen Milligan).Tories, however, have tended to have the last laugh, because, as Edmund Fawcett suggests early in his book, the left has been a ‘rash chess player’, too cocky and blinkered to strategise effectively against its opponents. Fawcett, a veteran ...”

“... making people throb with awakenedness.‘Instead of the philosophy being the clue to Lawrence,’ Stephen Potter wrote in 1930, ‘it will be Lawrence who is the clue to the philosophy.’ Almost a century later, Wilson takes a similar tack, although she is clearly not much taken with the philosophy in its own right: ‘For all his claims to prophetic ...”

“... probability, is true.The unhappy pattern anyway is starting to be noticed. The Times published a sharp letter to the editor a few days later that noticed how the paper had now crossed the line separating news analysis from invective. This has happened across the board, in the culture of the Trump presidency: you see it in the newspapers, the magazines and in ...”

“... like most of Dahl’s stories it has the emotional boniness of a shaggy dog story: it rests on a sharp punchline, but there is no love for or between the people in it. The tales from this period generally conclude with a snappy but mechanical twist in which the cheat is cheated, or the person trying to defraud someone else by betting or gambling or ...”

“... and each had demographic consequences that reach into the present. The historians R.W. Davies and Stephen Wheatcroft have put ‘excess deaths’ from the First World War, Revolution and Civil War – including those caused by disease and mass hunger – at 14.5 million. The effects on the Soviet population of political repression and the famine of 1932-33 ...”

“... short-lived and disastrous marriage to Annabella Milbanke, Raphael is in his element, as a sharp-eyed, sympathetic and worldly eavesdropper on a series of bedroom scenes. When he takes the story on to Switzerland, where Byron reluctantly resumed his affair with Claire Clairmont, and first met Shelley, he still seems to get the people and the personal ...”

“... begins momentously with Joseph Conrad, and develops into a meticulous and heartfelt tribute to Stephen Crane, concludes by recommending an old leather portmanteau as the best possible manure for fig trees. Mrs Gwendolen Bishop no doubt astonished Holland Park Avenue with the splendour of her costume; it’s the onions we remember her by. Recollection was a ...”