“... 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 ...”

“... much as seeking answers, and some of these possibilities are fascinating, whatever our scepticism may be about the larger project. Robert Nozick is cited (twice) as producing the elegant suggestion that we don’t have to choose between presence and absence, or between Heidegger’s Seiendes and Nichts, since we could have ...”

“... access to the corridors of power through its alumni network, which also included such figures as Robert Rubin, Clinton’s treasury secretary. If Goldman Sachs’s omnipotence is more than a piece of marketing hyperbole, he should have looked a lot harder at this issue. As it is, there is some reason to believe that Goldman’s heyday ...”

“... by initiating the publication of his collected works. On the 400th anniversary of his death, in May 1943, the Nazis seized the opportunity to reassert German ownership of Nicolaus Koppernick and to assert that the Poles were intellectually too weak to have produced so great a genius. The Allies claimed Mikulaj Kopernik for Occupied Poland, and as an icon of ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... there would have been too upsetting.’In The Jews of Vienna in the Age of Franz Joseph (1989), Robert Wistrich argues that for Roth ‘the world of the shtetl re-emerged as the ideal embodiment of a lost intimacy and innocence; the materialist values of the Western Bürgertum (Jewish and Gentile) represented its self-alienated antithesis.’ Roth’s ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... for the expatriate Iraqi opposition, it has always been a motley bunch. Its leader Ahmad Chalabi may be a brilliant man but he has been found guilty of fraud in Jordan and has no real constituency beyond Paul Wolfowitz’s Pentagon office. He and his helpers – Kanan Makiya, for example, the man who said that news of the merciless high-altitude US bombing ...”

“... Penrose had brought from Venice. Afterwards he sat in a room alone, weeping. ‘Whatever humour may dominate,’ Penrose writes, ‘there is always instability in P.’s mood. While in the happiest of moods, for some imperceptible reason a shadow falls across his face. It becomes pale, ridden with care and his eyes blacken like two nails driving deep into ...”