“... we may ask of you we have; the rest/Is not for publication,’ he could hardly have been more wrong. Within months, MacNeice’s friend and first employer, the Greek scholar E.R. Dodds, brought out The Strings Are False, a book of unrevised lectures called Varieties of Parable and a Collected Poems. Even now, with Peter McDonald’s intelligently ...”

“... East Coast filmmakers hurried West to seek maximum sunlight and maximum separation from Thomas Edison’s Motion Picture Patents Company, which demanded copyright payment or else a bullet in the expensive newfangled movie cameras. The canyons and ravines of the Hollywood Hills were the natural redoubts against the Patents Company ...”

“... Books of Jacob. I don’t think it’s coincidental that The Empusium, with its echoes of Thomas Mann and The Magic Mountain, came out as The Magic Mountain hit its centenary, an anniversary marked everywhere with articles about ‘Mann’s many prophetic ironies’ and ‘nuanced discussions’ and so on. No mention at all of the ‘painful ...”

“... seized by it [insanity], or approaching to it, at the very time when he was giving proofs of a more than ordinary soundness and vigour of judgment.’ Johnson’s Bolt Court household was itself a hospital in miniature with ‘whole nests of people ... the lame, the blind, the sick, and the sorrowful’, as Mrs Thrale sniffily put it, where ‘his old ...”

“... of ideas, or as Barrell puts it, ‘an intricately coiled or interwoven manifold’. ‘Far more of our deepest thoughts and feelings,’ said De Quincey, ‘pass to us through perplexed combinations of concrete objects, pass to us as involutes ... in compound experiences incapable of being disentangled, than ever reach us directly, and in their own ...”

“... made it impossible to write frankly about feelings. This embargo on telling the truth lasted until more liberal legislation allowed the veterans of the Thirties to lift the veil on their double lives. Isherwood’s Christopher and his Kind (1977) gives the most vivid account of the Weimar sub-culture, where ‘Berlin meant Boys.’ His earlier autobiographical ...”

“... it has lost some of its original vitality. Despite Freud’s affirmation that it is not more truthful to be serious, psychoanalytic theory, at least in Britain, is not in the least bit funny. It is always sober and usually earnest. The romance of psychoanalysis has been undermined by coercive fantasies of rigour and expertise promoted by the owners ...”

“... was raised by Lord Hillsborough, Secretary of State and owner of a large chunk of County Down, and Thomas Miller, Lord Justice Clerk and a custodian of the vast Sutherland estates. Both realised the reverse of the speculative impulses in the Americas: land without labour would produce no income. If people fled from rent-paying in Sutherland to rent-paying in ...”

“... have we, and this was already an old sort of story by the time Plato told it. He has made it seem more real by telling a local, recent version, but he would have known the mythic one quite well: for in the story of Perseus, the king and his court, who had sent the hero for the head of Gorgon Medusa, had to look when he took the disfigured thing from his ...”

“... that has not lightened the burden borne by the Victorians. Professional students of the period are more interested in analysis than judgment and see things differently – but they tend to be out of touch with general opinion. A collection of academic essays on the subject of ‘Victorian values’, first published in 1990, has just been reissued.* It is ...”

“... United States in 1968. One wonders how many rejections this book collected, 13 years ago, or even more recently, from British firms. The present publishers are to be congratulated, the Nobel Prize notwithstanding. The Issa Valley, a minor masterpiece, is even older: it first appeared in Paris, in Polish, in 1955. A new volume of poetry, Bells in ...”

“... to explain this phenomenon than E.P. Thompson himself. But his most recent book (or, more accurately, his hastily-assembled hodgepodge of pamphlets, letters, rejoinders, poems and memoirs) is not an exercise in explanation: it is an exercise in self-indulgence. As a political statement, it adds relatively little to Thompson’s last collection of ...”

“... than the sword, the sharpest pen is surely the cartoonist’s: one palpable hit from him will do more than months of routine pounding from lumbering leader-writers. This may be common knowledge. But is it true? After all, media experts of every hue – and not just those who see the press as the poodle of the powerful – have long been questioning the ...”

“... the acceptance speech must also bind up the wounds of strife within the party and anticipate the more peaceful tones of post-election rhetoric: the loser’s speech of concession, the victor’s magnanimous reply, and the President’s Inaugural Address. This double-edged requirement reflects a traditional tension between the fear that the country is winding ...”

“... Only Lawrence, Larkin’s earliest ‘touchstone against the false’, survives more or less intact. It would be easy enough, then, to argue that – fun and games aside – the really important revelation of these letters is that Larkin, the above-it-all curmudgeon and recluse, the arch-self-deprecator, was in truth nursing a champ-sized ...”