“... 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 ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... Stracheys galore had staffed the Raj throughout the 19th century, and Lytton’s dearest friend Leonard Woolf had just gone out to Ceylon. But here as in so many departments of life, the wind of change was blowing through Bloomsbury. From 1912 onwards, it was possible not only to talk openly of semen and atheism but also to ridicule the empire as an expense ...”

“... from the Scottish literary community for heresy. His book begins by quoting a letter the poet Tom Leonard wrote to an ‘inquiring editor’: ‘The one area I couldn’t touch would be contemporary Scottish writers, or the recent past. The place is too small, and I like to relax when I go for a walk.’Hames is challenging the belief that the affirmation of ...”

“... a first-rate American poetess. She really is good. Certainly one of the best female poets I ever read, and a damn sight better than the run of good male. Her main enthusiasm at present is me, and she thinks my verses are as good as I think they are and has accordingly and efficiently dispatched about twenty five to various immensely paying American ...”

“... the defence of enemies of the regime: from endangered wild species to the Native American activist Leonard Peltier, who was convicted of the murder of two FBI agents on the Pine Ridge Reservation in South Dakota, a crime for which, as Matthiessen contended in his 1983 book, In the Spirit of Crazy Horse, Peltier was framed.Matthiessen overstated things when he ...”

“... Black Hornet, Moth, The Long Legged Fly. Sallis is a fastidious man, intelligent and widely read (genre fiction, poetry, the Modernist canon). There’s nothing slapdash or merely strategic about his work. This, after all, is someone prepared to take years to contrive a proper translation of Raymond Queneau’s complex artifice, Saint Glinglin. So if ...”

“... in formation and resistant to external view. As an episodic (non-dues-paying) member, I have now read, in addition to the biography, the full-length critical studies by David Mikics and James Naremore, watched Jan Harlan’s excellent documentary, Stanley Kubrick: A Life in Pictures, and explored every entry in The Stanley Kubrick Archives edited by Alison ...”

“... brother of someone so famous and well-loved, but Cecil was convinced he’d been overlooked: Leonard Woolf noted the streak of ‘fanatical intolerance’ nourished by a ‘grudge against the universe, the world and you in particular’. Beginning as a Fabian socialist under the mentorship of Hubert Bland, Cecil came out in favour of the Boer War and ...”

“... against blasphemy. The introductory chapter of Blasphemy, by the great American legal scholar Leonard Levy, covers ‘the Jewish trial of Jesus’; it is followed in close succession, in Levy’s account, by the Christian invention of the concept of heresy and the persecution of the Socinian and Arminian heretics and later of the Ranters, Antinomians and ...”

“... performing in 1815, as his hearing further deteriorated. His work became more difficult, harder to read. But he remained an engaged and worldly businessman, who managed to sell the score of the Missa Solemnis to three different publishers at once (the triple-dating only came to light when two of the publishers met at a trade fair in Leipzig). Moreover, if his ...”

“... his credit) he stumbles several times when he has to broadcast this absurdity. 4 April. Asked to read The Good Companions for a possible production I find I can only get as far as the end of Act I. It’s interesting, though, in that it’s Priestley on one of his favourite themes, that of escape and escape from the North particularly. Act I, Scene I ends ...”

“... based on ‘modes of limited transposition’ and ‘non-retrogradable rhythms’ (rhythms that read the same way backwards and forwards, like palindromes): their purpose was to create a sense of atemporality, suggestive of theological timelessness. ‘The truths I express, the truths of the Faith,’ he said, were ‘always rooted in a radiant, unchanging ...”