“... puts off all foreign support, and stands alone, that I see him to be strong and to prevail,’ or more creepily, ‘The only gift is a portion of thyself. Thou must bleed for me.’ The strong long to create the strong whom they know will destroy them: that is their weakness.When Bloom is seen as a child of Emerson and Whitman, the anxiety of influence begins ...”

“... associated: he would have been a great Irish poet even if he had not become supranational, more universal than that description suggests. The new nation also needed a great Irish painter, and Jack Yeats, brother of the more famous W.B., was seen to supply the need. The question whether he was just a great Irish ...”

“... vulgar. Bruce McFarlane, a fellow of All Souls before becoming the history tutor at Magdalen, knew more about the late Middle Ages than anyone alive, but could not translate any of his knowledge into books. Sparrow might have liked to be such a man, but he wasn’t Lowe describes visiting him in old age. He got Lowe to line up his complete works on a shelf by ...”

“... than agent, but is capable of wishing to escape from his sufferings. Then there are two of him, or more – a development which expresses his dilemma and attempted escape. The character lacks character, very often, and exercises a negative capability which turns these novels towards the condition of poetry. This is what Goethe, in Wilhelm Meister, thought all ...”

“... with mine. ‘Technique is important in poetry only so that it may reveal the supernatural.’ Or, more unevasively still: ‘As Patrick read his verso I would listen not for the rhythm, nor for the obvious sense in the lines, but for some superior sense beyond the actual words, some harmonics, communicating a sacred message or incantation delighting me with ...”

“... the language itself frustrates by appealing, implicitly and inevitably, to English-language-users more worldly-wise than we are. If this is true (it is a matter seldom canvassed), out of many possibilities that spring to mind two should be noticed: first, we may conceive of a language – as it might be Russian, or even American English – that is less ...”

“... Hollinghurst’s fondness for triads of the adjective-adjective-noun kind, on the model of Thomas Gray’s ‘mute inglorious Milton’. Nothing is more lyrically English than this smooth cluster, and Hollinghurst’s ability to spool these triplets throughout the book is marvellous. But they appear so often that ...”

“... it was known), keeping its regulars up till dawn with his brilliant conversation. There was a lot more to him than one-liners and limericks; and if one thing emerges from the thickets of Stephen Lloyd’s excessively long biography, it is that Lambert had one of the finest musical minds of his generation and a critical faculty second to almost none. During ...”

“... of cells, some from my immune system, which wall off the tubercle bacilli that infected me more than half a century ago during my childhood in the North of England. Calcium salts have built up and settled in it over the years, so it shows on a chest X-ray. The tubercle bacillus grows very slowly; its epidemics take centuries and the disease it causes ...”

“... Twenty-five years ago A.L. Rowse, whose memory becomes more blessed in an age of research assessment exercises, made known to the world the riveting personality of the Elizabethan and Jacobean astrologer, private-enterprise medical practitioner, counsellor, sexual athlete and compulsive writer Simon Forman. Forman’s voluminous papers, case-notes, diaries and all sorts of other writings had been in the Bodleian Library since Elias Ashmole presented them in the late 17th century ...”

“... presence of the man. Never was such a subtle and splendid intellect employed to serve meaner or more trivial ends, and neither pride nor gratitude nor loyalty to friends were allowed to brake his climb to wealth and influence.Edward Coke (pronounced ‘Cook’) was born in 1552 into a family of minor Norfolk gentry. He prospered as a barrister under the ...”

“... constable, Anne de Montmorency, had been arguing for Rhodes, but even he had to concede that more guns had been fired, more mines dug, at Malta. La Roche, who was present at the siege, though he played an inglorious part in Malta’s defence, virtually recommending surrender at the moment of supreme danger, won the ...”

“... Herriman, inventor of the sweet, enigmatic Krazy Kat, a strip that refined a single situation for more than thirty years, is another. And then there is Robert Crumb, better known as R. Crumb, the originator of so-called ‘underground comix’. Now 82, Crumb is America’s greatest cartoonist. Inimitable and inventive as Herriman and Gould were, neither had ...”

“... political judgment is subjected to repeated censure, but his personal qualities leave even more to be desired. The image is of a man without human feeling, cold, ambitious, disloyal to friends and ruthless towards former lovers. This cannot be quite right: people as cold and hard as Sharp is held to have been do not destroy themselves in alcoholic ...”

“... own turn towards spiritualism. The poem echoes, to different and clearly parodic effect, the Dylan Thomas of ‘Fern Hill’: ‘In the green rags of the Bible I tore up/The straight silk of childhood on my head.’ It is, for Tonks, unusually dense and incrusted with the Dylanesque verbal impasto of the 1940s poets, the ‘new romantics’ she would have read ...”