“... amateur from a pianist like Gould is a matter of total difference, not degree. To be able to sight-read and memorise anything, to translate one’s reading of notes on a page into an immediate sound on the instrument, using one’s fingers in mostly unnatural ways, to have the confidence (this is of capital importance) to know that one can do this at any ...”

“... at Stead, the moving spirit of the crusade. In a letter from Paris to the publisher of the Savoy, Leonard Smithers, himself a great connoisseur of erotica, Beardsley noted: ‘I read in the papers here that Stead has established an agency for the adoption of children. Is it true? If so I certainly mean to adopt some nice ...”

“... whereas Tromly’s is a story of failure, told from the perspective of a critical outsider who has read the archives with all their dirty secrets. Tromly’s ‘hidden transcripts’ – the role of competition for funding and intelligence contacts – are almost completely absent in Reddaway’s story. Absent also is any mention of the Cold War: it doesn’t ...”

“... a piece of ‘poetic drama’, which for him usually seems to mean closet drama, something to be read, not acted), like Dover Wilson before him he sees it as a play that presents a set of events and even motivations as definitive and unchanging as those of a realist novel. As many have remarked, in Hamlet Shakespeare deliberately withholds certain key pieces ...”

“... to Christianity, and has a particularly strong presence in epic poetry. Dante’s Paradiso can be read as an extended example. There is a brilliant parody of this tradition in Ariosto’s Orlando Furioso, in an episode where the knight Astolfo is brought to the moon by St John the Evangelist; they travel in Elijah’s chariot. Tasso’s Gerusalemme Liberata ...”

“... of New Labour. Why Europe Will Run the 21st Century declaims the title of a manifesto by Mark Leonard, the party’s foreign policy wunderkind.2 ‘Imagine a world of peace, prosperity and democracy,’ he enjoins the reader. ‘What I am asking you to imagine is the “New European Century”.’ How will this entrancing prospect come about? ‘Europe ...”

“... quotes the passage in Howards End where Helen Schlegel explains the character of Mr Wilcox to Leonard Bast, the bank clerk he has inadvertently ruined: ‘There are two kinds of people – our kind, who live straight from the middle of their heads, and the other kind who can’t, because their heads have no middle. They can’t say “I”. They aren’t ...”

“... insisting that the low-life elements do not ultimately subvert the defence of princely authority. Leonard Tennenhouse (PS) shows how the ‘carnivalesque’ was harnessed to official ideologies under Elizabeth and James I. Terence Hawkes, Francis Barker and Peter Hulme (AS), and Paul Brown (PS), link The Tempest with the ideology of colonisation, arguing that ...”

“... whole British Empire’. He appears already to have had that goal in mind as he travelled south to read modern languages at Cambridge, where F.R. Leavis encouraged him to ‘add modernist rigour to his Celtic romanticism’. He was part of a left-wing circle that included Raymond Williams, D.J. Enright and Maurice Craig, a Northern Irishman who remembered ...”

“... at some level about imperial and global events. They didn’t even necessarily have to be able to read. One of the major reasons why is brilliantly set out in James Belich’s Replenishing the Earth: The Settler Revolution and the Rise of the Angloworld, 1783-1939. Reading these two formidable and formidably long books back to back is to be alerted to how ...”

“... eighty, published her personal tribute in the Times. The two women had been friends of a sort (Leonard disapproved): both were leading lights in famous circles of famous friends; both possessed a conversational brilliance liable to be iced with cruelty, an intensity threatening always to pitch into dangerous hilarity. Margot remembered her first sighting ...”

“... provide the occasion for a major reassessment of his subject’s standing as a poet. Having just read a lot of the poetry, I have to say that I find it hard to imagine Day-Lewis’s reputation being swept to new heights by a surge of critical acclaim. From this distance, his career as a poet seems of greater interest than the poetry itself, providing a ...”

“... books have safely been turned into sound without Frigicom technology, in audio versions (both read by Nick Sullivan) that last 47 hours 55 minutes and 37 hrs 41 mins respectively.Two images of artistic endeavour emerge from a seventy-page party scene in The Recognitions. The tortured composer Stanley talks about ‘living among palimpsests … double and ...”

“... the story, Hughes wrote a poem about his caller, and the following night the creature returned, read the new poem, and gave the poet a genial thumbs-up. Some years later Hughes told another variation to John Carey, to which he added some Jungian grace notes, and the probably too uncanny touch that the visitor was Hughes himself with a vulpine head. In Poet ...”

“... highbrow for their purposes … Its inhibitions stretch from sex to the class struggle. It can be read aloud in mixed company without calling a blush to the cheek of the most virtuous banker.’Some of the new magazine’s contributors were middle class, but an extremely ambitious cohort of undergraduates at City College, a campus of the public City ...”