“... I read Christopher Woodward’s book in August and then reread it in September: what a difference a month can make. Insistent images of newly ravaged places, like the ghostly fretwork silhouette which looms over Ground Zero, seem to sneer at us, laughing at our fragile optimism. The notion of the ruin as an expression of violence and blind hatred is not Woodward’s subject, however hard it may be to avoid the connection ...”

“... and ‘Evidence in the Eliot Case’ (1996) – this last featuring a notably unkind commentary on Christopher Ricks’s editing of Eliot’s Inventions of the March Hare: Poems 1909-17. In the new book, as in these essays, Raine assumes that his readers are likely to be ‘somewhat impure and apt to confuse issues’. It is my impression that he remained ...”

“... wiser than he is argue about the intricacies of war, not least the involvement of white men in a Black conflict. ‘Is it not because of Wilson and Britain that we are losing this war?’ one man asks. ‘Yes,’ another replies,but also, look everywhere. The only reason we are alive and still fighting is because of white people. Look at the fathers ...”

“... to words. It seems to Simón that the boy perceives numbers as ‘islands floating in a great black sea of nothingness’, that at times a distant voice from another sphere of being is issuing from the boy’s mouth. The authorities diagnose a ‘specific deficit linked to symbolic activities’ and set about transferring David to a special boarding ...”

“... of the military recruiting centres in the Bay Area. Sympathisers of the not yet discredited Black Panther Party were in evidence, as were those who had been beaten and tear-gassed alongside César Chávez in his fight to unionise the near-serfs of the Salinas Valley agribusiness empire. All the strands of ‘the movement’ were still in some kind of ...”

“... three and the other aged 14 months. She then went calmly to the authorities and claimed that a black man had hijacked her car and driven off with her kids. For nine days, a racial manhunt convulsed the state. Then came the salvage of the car and the children’s bodies, the confession, the hysteria, the prayer-meetings ... It emerged that Ms Smith had at ...”

“... era. Take the Mel Gibson movie The Patriot, which shows a South Carolina planter with a black ‘employee’ who willingly joins a Patriot militia and takes arms against the British. Have a look at the many high-school or college textbooks in the US in which slavery is depicted as a peripheral aspect of the Revolution, but a central feature of ...”

“... its old blanket denial and replacing it with a strategy of ‘information management’, as Christopher Moran termed it in his recent book, Classified: Secrecy and the State in Modern Britain.* Historians thought sympathetic to the intelligence services were granted privileged access to closed papers in order to produce official histories. One of them ...”

“... Poet of Sonnet 86 remains George Chapman, not, as some think, Samuel Daniel or Michael Drayton or Christopher Marlowe or Ben Jonson or, since his was assuredly an ‘alien pen’ (Sonnet 78), Torquato Tasso. Candidates for the doubtful honour of being the Dark Lady are discussed (so far as the list went in 1970) and a slight preference is registered for Mary ...”

“... a study of Wells’s composition methods, H.G. Wells under Revision (1990, co-edited with Christopher Rolfe), and the reissue of Wells’s scientific romances currently appearing under the World’s Classics imprint. (For copyright reasons – Wells having died in 1946 – this series will probably only be available in America.) Parrinder’s more ...”

“... Donald, with whom she lived in Surrey, he does his best impression of an ordinary bloke, a black sheep of the Dublin business caste who has made good in a modest way and sends thanks for a set of golf clubs or passes on news of characters from their childhoods: ‘The Hamiltons … didn’t leave a stivver to poor Eddy, in fact I think he was owed a ...”

“... Moncrieff’s grip on Proust’s syntax, but this can be a case of the pot calling the kettle black. Consider the saga of the misplaced ‘only’. Perhaps Kilmartin and Enright took the view that it would have been unnecessarily pedantic to transfer the binding rigidities of French syntax to English. But if so, there can be little excuse for getting your ...”

“... love, and then sails north at last, his boat weighted down with chairs, tables, and an upright black piano strapped and locked on deck, the varnish quickly warming as it flashes back the sun. But suppose everything weren’t a message or a sign? Then these poems would seem complacent in the possession of sentiments they haven’t earned. Or too happy in ...”

“... Christopher Lasch, who died last year, has been rather undernoticed in Britain. His attention was admittedly focused on American politics and political thinking, but his fears and anxieties translate readily enough to a Britain showing many of the same symptoms of social and political disaffection, while his politics and his polemical style were those of an urbanised Cobbett – radical, popular, egalitarian and quite unplaceable on a left-right spectrum ...”

“... Christopher Wren, England’s best known architect and one of its greatest natural philosophers, experimented with everything: stone and wood, cones and domes, animals and men. He liked to depart from revered authorities. Under his hands plans for a church steeple or an academic hall would turn into a bold revision of Vitruvian schemes, the twitches of an anatomised dog into a startling challenge to Galenic orthodoxy, the motion of a planetary model into liberation from the ‘tyranny’ of ancient astronomy ...”