“... 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 ...”

“... him feel most at ease. ‘It was a relief,’ he later wrote, ‘to live in among a great gang of black and brown humanity.’ His first visit to the city, in 1924, lasted only a few days, but it left a lasting impression and he was back two years later. He had already made friends in the city’s bars and cafés, and before long he was doing occasional ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... had been bedevilled by some 19,000 US Army deserters involved in large-scale robbery and black market dealings in the rear areas.’ One group syphoned off petrol needed for tanks and sold it on the French black market. Whiting’s italics and exclamation-mark seem amply justified when he reports that from February ...”

“... by a real spy, had helped to contribute to American success in the war. Perhaps they had. Christopher Benfey tells the story extremely well, with a light touch and a lot of scholarship. He likes and admires Crane but is judicious about the quality of his work and does not try to claim too much for it. The stunning success of The Red Badge of ...”