“... much more.) On the other hand, £25 (though a distinctly modest price for a book of this size) may seem a bit steep for half of the facts. The amount of documentation available is indeed fantastic: to go no further, accounts of conversations with him, excluding Eckermann’s, run to some four thousand printed pages, by Boyle’s estimate, some twelve ...”

“... what he wanted was more warmth. (The greater part of the warmth went into the writing; Goethe may have had this in mind when he made the otherwise florid and trite declaration that all his works were fragments of a great confession.) When he had at last finished the complete Faust, he wrote (24 July): ‘I think it’s about the best thing ever ...”

“... that his great object had been to get electricity from a magnet. Visitors to Exhibition Road may also experience some incredulity, for the first caption they come to is dominated by that text from Romans 1.20 which suggests that those who fail to discern the finger of God in creation are without excuse: ‘For the invisible things of Him, from the ...”

“... of what must be her lap. This cunning emphasis on marginal detail, so characteristic of Ingres, may prompt the visitor to the Metropolitan Museum in New York to wonder whether it was modesty which made Madame Leblanc decline to exhibit so very valuable a possession more ostentatiously in her portrait, or the painter’s reluctance to let sparkle distract ...”

“... Gratiano but the virtuous Antonio, treat him. Antonio agrees that when their bargain is over he may well resume his practice of spitting on Shylock’s Jewish gaberdine. The key passage here is ‘Hath not a Jew eyes? Hath not a Jew hands, organs, dimensions, senses, affections, passions, etc?’ If one were to take the play at the simplest, most schematic ...”

“... have news from the animals and how it’s meant to affect us. To put it another way, sociobiology may now take on a modish garb: homosexual lizards are suddenly ‘discovered’ in the South-Western United States; some females in nature turn out to be, rather briefly, nice to each other. Do we care? This is of course unfair, since both writers might argue ...”

“... to restore the forward march of British labour which began to falter thirty years ago.’ This may not seem a very startling conclusion, even for 1978: the thesis that Labour was in electoral decline had already been well documented by Ivor Crewe and his colleagues at the University of Essex, while others of us, sympathetic to the radical right wing of the ...”

“... when she was a child after such a tea; and she and Yeats were born in the same year, 1865. Empson may have given up writing poems forty or so years ago, but such prose is at least as well written as good poetry. And so is the touching vision of how it may have been that Andrew Marvell succumbed to the ague or the ...”

“... A city without a past is a city without a future. It may exist as a set of buildings, but not as a culture. But not every city with a past has a future, except as a set of buildings. The springs of innovation may dry up, the crossroads that first gave it its importance may no longer lead anywhere ...”

“... great metaphysical systems of German Idealism. The challenge consists in the suggestion that we may somehow be locked in by our own limitations, unable to crash through to something with which it is very important to get in touch. In the Middle Ages, it was God who seemed out of reach. Human finitude might, or might not, manage to bridge the gap between ...”

“... things. If this is so, Ackroyd underrates how sheerly unusual was Eliot’s course of life. Eliot may speak of his pusillanimity, but it may be pusillanimously self-gratifying of us to concur. Yet at the same time Ackroyd does the opposite: he finds Eliot more unusual, in my judgment, than is warranted by Ackroyd’s own ...”

“... There may not be any royal road to the understanding of an alien or half-alien culture – contemporary Japan, or the Medieval West – but one path which appears to lead into the interior is the study of that culture’s heroes. If we can only discover why, say, kamikaze pilots or Medieval saints have been singled out for honour, so the argument goes, the basic values of the culture which admires them will be revealed ...”

“... up the Latin picaresque tradition. The new English audience was, what the original Greek audience may have been, a comfortable urban middle class, prosperous enough to believe in virtue and true love, towny enough to view the country only as a nursery of picturesque innocence or a theatre of primitive brigandage. The relationship was indeed recognised: but it ...”

“... way of life which, even as described in his own anthology, seems relatively unappealing. Whatever may be said in favour of the country house as a mode of government, way of life, shrine of culture or architectural artifact, there is clearly much to be said against it too, in part because so many country-house owners seem to have been so peculiarly insensitive ...”

“... improvement in readability is enormous, for, through Henry, that inspired comic creation, Berryman may be said to have found his own distinctive voice. Berryman’s early work is strenuous in manner, full of devices learned from his poetic forebears: Milton’s substitution of adjectives for adverbs, for example, or Hopkins’s expressive breaking and ...”