“... of expertise may be relevant here. He makes much of his linguistic prowess, boasting of having read Anna Karenina in the original ‘in two volumes from cover to cover’, yet he has a shakier grasp of Russian than he claims. He mentions, for instance, a chance encounter with Gorbachev he says he had while serving as a junior spy in Moscow. When asked by ...”

“... lantern leading the way: some other lanterns glimmering: the scent of wild thyme’.The people who read about Brooke in the papers knew nothing of this, and nothing of his charm and beauty (Leonard Woolf: ‘His looks were stunning – it is the only appropriate adjective’; W.B. Yeats: ‘the handsomest young man in ...”

“... on the Soviet Union’s development in the Twenties; being a tireless worker, he was prepared to read through quantities of indigestible Soviet material to the end of his life. Regularly, despite his age, the volumes succeeded each other. Carr brought many gifts to the study of Russia. He could handle many languages, and his training as a Classical scholar ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... of Buckley provoked discontent in right-wing reviewers (once they had given it a ‘Washington read’ and searched for their names in the index). Not all the facts of the life were convenient. What appeared to be a career on the permanent offensive looked somewhat different when viewed at longer range. The same Buckley who swooned over McCarthy was ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... 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 ...”