“... his writing because his life was so full of confinement? His earliest surviving letter, written in May 1796 when he was 21, is addressed to an important friend and contains some surprising information: ‘Coleridge, I know not what suffering scenes you have gone through at Bristol, – my life has been somewhat diversified of late. The 6 weeks that finished ...”

“... Notes for Joyce (1974, revised and republished in 1988 as Ulysses Annotated by Don Gifford with Robert J. Seidman). It shows Joyce as both systematic in his approach to fact and at times struggling, and often failing, in his effort to avoid error. And it makes clear that Ulysses has a mundane source book – Thom’s Directory – to match The Odyssey, its ...”

“... has himself made a film about Hitler. ‘What was evil a few years ago and now seems undangerous may be evil again in another few ...”

“... a point. For instance, she privately draws doom-ridden conclusions from her supposed descent from Robert FitzRoy, who committed suicide, like his uncle Castlereagh, and like her father, who wasn’t married to her mother, but left her his name – which he didn’t spell in the supposedly ancestral fashion with a capital in the middle. That spelling Charlotte ...”

“... of Animal Farm have been published. That is probably not quite up to date. In a Soviet Union where Robert Conquest was fêted on a recent visit, and his The Great Terror and The Harvest of Sorrow are being serialised, there is not likely to be any flinching at Orwell. The Orwell industry, then, shows no sign of decline, in part because of his political ...”

“... of, Hess was free on bail in West Germany, awaiting trial for espionage. His friend disappeared in May 1987. ‘In an isolated forest outside of Hanover,’ Stoll reports, ‘police found his charred bones next to a melted can of gasoline... No suicide note was found.’ In his own quiet way, Stoll becomes a hero. He is invited to give talks in Washington and ...”

“... destitution, or its schizoid sexual morality, or just the improving works of Samuel Smiles? We may never know, but there is more than a suspicion that the distinctly unpolymathic chemist/lawyer/housewife was just embroidering on a few simplistic items of Grantham family folklore. No matter that the nation relearns morality from such dubious sources. Other ...”

“... rubbish he and his colleagues were obliged to churn out day by day. Here again, I think, things may well have changed for the better. For most modern Reardons, these rending scenes will instantly evoke images of Chancery Lane – or, more precisely, that small alley off the Lane where generations of book reviewers and literary men have known the confused ...”

“... that somewhere along the line he absorbed the influence, for example, of the Minnesota poets, Robert Bly and James Wright. He has the same candour and simplicity, and, like them, sometimes lays himself open to a charge of naivety – technical as much as emotional, if we can distinguish between the two. But his naivety, if such it is, differs ...”

“... very clever indeed: the conception itself is ingenious, the pastiche little short of brilliant. I may be underestimating ‘Immram’ by praising it in these terms; and if that is so, let me hasten to say that brilliance, a surface attribute, is not the most remarkable feature of this poet’s work. In its generally elusive, yet sometimes fearsomely direct ...”

“... this, however valuable, is literary history narrowly conceived. A partial exception, perhaps, is Robert Ellrodt’s vast, French, phenomenological, semi-Bachelardian study of the Metaphysical sensibilité, to which he here adds a note, in a piece on ‘Angels and the Poetic Imagination from Donne to Traherne’: but Ellrodt’s yearning for a kind of ...”

“... the creator saw further than the follower of Chatterton. However quaint the ‘slug-horn’ may seem in Chatterton’s ‘Battle of Hastings II’, it has a peculiar rightness in Browning’s poem. As Barry Tuckwell, its foremost living exponent, reminds us in his splendid new book, the horn began its history in utterance and has never shaken off its ...”

“... Blyth’s banalities, are at odds with this discordant factor, and only Sir Frederick Ashton and Robert Tear express an independent disenchantment, the former in something close to bitchiness, the latter in a more technical way: Tear was banished after choosing to sing Dov in The Knot Garden rather than Lechmere in Owen Wingrave, and there can surely be no ...”

“... to the collection, White locates the main problem in a development which his own earlier Writings may, ironically, have helped to accentuate: this is the modern historian’s withdrawal of confidence in the protocol of narrative. ‘Many modern historians,’ he writes, ‘hold that narrative discourse, far from being a neutral medium for the representation ...”

“... of Colin and Caroline, holidaying in Venice, attracts the fascinated attention of the sadistic Robert, who has already nearly killed his wife during their sado-masochistic sexual sessions, and eventually succeeds in calmly murdering Colin. In The Innocent the engagement night of Leonard, the callow English hero, and his German lover Maria, is interrupted ...”