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“... Yet, though the lines of battle have been starkly drawn, the engagements are seldom direct. Christopher Norris describes the situation perceptively in The Contest of Faculties, paying special attention to one of the parties on the literary side of the dispute: ‘Deconstructionists,’ he writes, ‘continue to snipe from the sidelines at a mainstream ...”

“... the manuscript originals, not trusting even the most scrupulous editorial transcription, and would hope to find caches which had escaped the compilers. Writers of monographs, theses and articles in learned journals will consult and draw on these volumes but even in the case of an author like Conrad, the number of scholars involved is ...”

“... things get going with Bob, Forster is able to write: ‘I am happier now than ever in my life, and hope that if anyone reads this book he will get to this. Aged 55.’ Things were often less happy between them, but Forster forged a famously durable relationship with the Buckinghams, was godfather to their son Robin (who died of Hodgkin’s disease in ...”

“... see but not experience: living is necessarily independent of it. In his study of Samuel Beckett, Christopher Ricks says that we desire both oblivion and eternity; but except in the insidiously artificial world of writers like Beckett, who make death a cliché within the life of language, neither of these wishes makes much sense. Dr Johnson would have ...”

“... upbeat. The new season (which has just opened) would include world premieres by Wayne McGregor, Christopher Wheeldon and Kyle Abraham, alongside classic ballets by Kenneth MacMillan and Frederick Ashton. In May and June, ahead of the full reopening, the company streamed an online programme featuring choreographers closely associated with the Royal ...”

“... found that even in London, it was a minority sect, at least until the early years of Elizabeth. Christopher Haigh, who describes himself as an ex-Methodist Anglican agnostic, decided that this revisionist band needed a leader, and headed into battle with a stream of publications that came to full fruition in English Reformations: Religion, Politics and ...”

“... can take the dark out of the night-time and paint the day-time black’). And while I’m at it, I hope Howard won’t think it excessively presumptuous to ask that he begin with the great Proustian theme of Names by doing something about the persistence, historically understandable in Scott Moncrieff, but inexcusable in Kilmartin and Enright, of ‘Christian ...”

“... recently left Harvard, where he had his head turned by Emerson’s lectures. He goes west in the hope that being in nature will lead him to the source of the benevolent power ‘that he perceived to underlie all the familiar things of his life’. Instead he finds suffering and pointless slaughter, and ends up so preoccupied with finding a new identity for ...”

“... he and some of his colleagues have developed on the characteristics of books they haven’t read. Christopher Booker did a rather similar job, informing us that ‘I have never read The Road to Oxiana,’ and then telling us his opinion of it, in a recent review of Paul Fussell’s Abroad.By an amiable irony, the same issue of the Spectator which contains ...”

“... treatment for cancer. ‘Carol didn’t know whether she was going to live to finish it,’ Christopher Potter, her editor, told a journalist. ‘As soon as she had a few chapters she sent them to me and they were quite rough compared to what I was used to.’ He and Shields worked together on smoothing out the manuscript. But Unless takes large ...”

“... to an analysis of Donne’s poem ‘The Bait’, which, Alareer explains, is a parody of the Christopher Marlowe poem generally known as ‘The Passionate Shepherd to His Love’. When you parody something, Alareer says, ‘you try to offer the readers another possibility, of another worldview, a different worldview, telling the people: hey, this isn’t ...”

“... oddballs who flit through the narrative, like Gustavus Adolphus (‘military genius’), or Christopher Marlowe (‘quite troubled’), or Savonarola (‘especially erratic monk’). The glossary at the back doesn’t help much: ‘Müller, Johann Joachim. 1661-1733. German jurist’; ‘Viret, Pierre. 1511-1571. Swiss theologian’; ‘von ...”

“... things were not going well at home. Glenconner by now had five children: Charles, Henry, Christopher and the twins May and Amy. Their father found it difficult to be ‘affectionate or tactile’ with them and Glenconner, still following the pattern set in her own family, felt it was more ‘urgent’ to be a wife than a mother. She sent the children ...”

“... became known as MI5 and MI6 had to be kept so secret; MI5 remained officially secret for 80 years. Christopher Andrew has another explanation, however. It was just a ‘taboo’, he writes (quoting the historian Michael Howard), like ‘intra-marital sex’. Everyone knew it went on, and was ‘quite content that it should, but to speak, write or ask questions ...”

“... it seeks to include within one set of covers everything that any serious reader of Waugh might hope to find ... everything notably funny, elegant, beautiful, profound or self-revealing, and everything that seems to define Waugh’s own aims.’ The ‘overproduction’ could in the nature of the case not be stopped, at this time of day, even by the least ...”