“... the distressing lack of literary interchange between the two countries at present – a lack far more pronounced with poetry than with fiction. Two poets, then, sharing language, youth, and a broadening ocean. At the moment, the criticism of American poetry is a diverse and, at bottom, unnervingly haphazard business. Given the multitudes of poets publishing ...”

“... reports, is regularly interpreted as the trumpet of fame awakening the dreamer. (I am put in mind more of early mornings in households where the parents believe their children to be music-making angels.) The angelic figure’s wings are those of an eagle, and that makes Dr Liebert connect The Dreamer with the ‘presentation drawing’ (whose finished state ...”

“... is less dense, less effortful in the reading, than is the case with the Irish Troubles and, more markedly, with The Singapore Grip. Jane Austen comes to mind, and not only because of the relative domesticity of the story, or its rather Austenish adultress, Mrs Forester: ‘We have decided to be friends, Emily and I, because we find men to be such coarse ...”

“... and almost the entire Behaviourist school – have tended to deny that mind was anything much more than patterns of reflex arcs. Perhaps it is a universal generalisation that great advances, and men of supreme acknowledged achievement from Aristotle onwards, inhibit change and achievement beyond their frontiers of understanding by the awe they cast behind ...”

“... platitudes, a civil servant mangling a story, a mime of minimal narrative competence which makes Thomas Mann’s bumbling Zeitblom look like Nabokov. ‘Insofar as the cliché can be used without irony,’ we read a little earlier, ‘he had become a respected literary voice.’ A cliché can’t be used without irony unless you forget it’s a cliché, and ...”

“... that a civilised gentleman ought to tolerate and patronise. Neville found his own project more difficult. It seems that he began writing his memoir in the Thirties and completed it in the Fifties. He wanted to defend Lawrence – and Lawrence’s parents – against their detractors; somehow, he could not help patronising them and making them seem ...”

“... some conceptions insist on our asking whether it is fair that some people should enjoy markedly more advantages than others. Those ideas dispute the ground, not just in the journals but in politics, with the presently more successful notion that you are entitled to what you have got or can get, so long as you rightfully ...”

“... so rigorously to every figure he encounters in The Play of the Eyes, affairs of the mind are far more important than those of either body or personality. One by one the literary heroes of these Viennese years are summoned up, re-examined and found wanting in essential seriousness. Wittgenstein attracts only a passing mention, identified as ‘a ...”

“... inside forty seconds into one concerning the best method of preserving bacon fat.’ There is more than a touch of this creative restlessness in After Hours with P.G. Wodehouse. Readers of this journal may recall a Diary by Richard Usborne (LRB, 4 October 1984) in which a determined investigation into the origins of Wodehouse’s use of ‘exquisite ...”

“... the medical profession of the Twenties and Thirties, was, ultimately, a melodramatic plea for a more scientific medical education. Paradoxically, the medical man who has produced the strongest case against his brothers has spurned the mantle of revolutionary. Thomas McKeown has long argued on epidemiological grounds that ...”

“... medical terminology reifies as objective physical states and processes what are more properly seen as subjective intellectual constructs. And she wishes us to go further still and to ‘start from the assumption that the imagination and perceptions of a given period have the power to generate reality.’ The title of her book in the original ...”

“... I have no feeling one way or the other about such bidder’s country of origin. It seems to me no more incongruous that the Tate Gallery should have a large collection of Monets (say) than that Buffalo University should have a collection of Robert Graves manuscripts (say). I view with unconcern the drift of British manuscripts to America, where our language ...”

“... Hemingway in Key West; the most appropriate Stevens’s refusing to speak at a memorial for Dylan Thomas, whom he thought of as ‘an utterly improvident person’.Stevens, trained as a lawyer, worked for most of his life for the Hartford Accident and Indemnity Company. He was born in 1879, of Dutch-German descent, in Reading, Pennsylvania; attended ...”

“... he published his first short-story collection, CivilWarLand in Bad Decline. This was praised by Thomas Pynchon as well as Wolff, and since then Saunders has been about as successful as a scrupulous writer of offbeat stories can be. He has returned to the writing-school circuit as a teacher and collected numerous National Magazine and O. Henry Awards. Each ...”

“... both were clothed alike’. Only later, at the start of their formal education, did boys enter a more markedly masculine sphere – an experience finely dramatised in Tom Brown’s Schooldays. The growing boy is removed from the inadequate female guidance of mother, sisters and nursery-maid, and socialised in the exclusively masculine institution of a public ...”