“... without polemical side-glances, he can be perfectly lucid and explicit, indeed a pure joy to read. When he takes a stand on current controversies, he tends to be cryptic and elliptic, briefly marshalling a series of arguments which are rarely elaborated to the extent that would have been necessary to make them persuasive. Moreover, he never engages in ...”

“... a bit like an Americanised nouveau roman and puts Baker somewhere on a line of descent between Donald Barthelme, with whom he briefly studied, and David Foster Wallace. Yet Howie isn’t void-struck or an object of satire. Like Mike, the narrator of Baker’s second novel, Room Temperature (1990), he just wants to get things ‘correctly situated in the ...”

“... are holding 155. They cannot lie down. They are pressured to sign documents in English they cannot read. The one source of running water in the cell is the single open toilet, where one defecates in the crowd.*The head of an anti-immigrant group, the Federation for American Immigration Reform, says the administration ‘doesn’t want the detention experience ...”

“... by the subsequent debates and committees into a subtly but crucially different shape. Now it read that ‘Congress shall make no law respecting an establishment of religion, or prohibiting the free exercise thereof; or abridging the freedom of speech, or of the press’ (my italics). Thus, in the context of a recently successful rebellion against the ...”

“... collection of Britten’s letters and diaries, entitled Letters from a Life and edited by Donald Mitchell and Philip Reed, appeared in 1991, and its first volume covers the same period as this new collection; but there was plenty of work for the new editor, John Evans. The diaries were begun when Britten was 15 and ended, rather abruptly, when he was ...”

“... and Melodious Guile, to my mind the best of his critical books, takes its place – along with Donald Davie’s Articulate Energy and Winifred Nowottny’s The Language Poets Use – among the very few enjoyable and enriching studies of how poetry works. Where Davie discusses syntax and Nowottny diction, Hollander bats the bounding breeze on poets’ ploys ...”

“... That, you might say, is perfectly lucid, but you might say that only after you have read the sentence twice. I take it to mean that as long as no one has laid down rules for arranging things, you are free to arrange them as you see fit. Following this ‘museum’ principle, Spufford sets out his representative texts in accordance with a ...”

“... till ready,2 has recently appeared and its excellence shamed me into tracking down Vol. One. 2. Donald Davie, from his memoirs, just published under the title These the Companions.3 And 3. Lord Longford, from his Diary of a Year4 – the year 1981. Each of these books makes much of its own modesty, of its willingness to expose its author’s true and warty ...”

“... charge sheet could contain tens of thousands of crimes; rooms full of documents will need to be read; a multitude of victims and witnesses will wish to testify. Mounting a rigorous defence will be time-consuming. Yet there must be a rigorous defence. By providing due process to those accused of the most heinous crimes, societies demonstrate their adherence ...”

“... In the American Grain at the corner of her desk, which she had bought so she’d have something to read on the long subway ride to and from work. The couple had a son, Paul, in 1943, a musical prodigy and now a well-known violinist and conductor. Over the course of his long writing life Zukofsky produced several volumes of lyric poetry, a good deal of it ...”

“... to have been one of Buhari’s aides, though he provides no details – this is pretty hard to read without flinching. But the double standards at work shouldn’t distract from the bogusness of the do-gooding part of Blair’s proposition. Deliverology is itself a false prospectus. It relies on the assumption that Blair gradually mastered these skills on ...”

“... of the time, before pharaohs and pyramids, when everything was still to come’: the Miami-born Donald Justice found the passage in Henry James for me at the beginning of my time here. ‘Saigon, 1969,’ my friend Larry Joseph said, when I sat him in Leonardo’s coffee bar a block away from campus. ‘Fucking Yucatan,’ I called it, not dismissively but ...”

“... books, but no match for Leavis’s dismissive account of Shelley in Revaluation (1936). Herbert Read, G.Wilson Knight, Frederick Pottle and many other defenders argued that Shelley’s poetry is sustained by the coherence of its imagery, and that the work as a whole shows an extremely intelligent mind fully in touch with the philosophy and science available ...”

“... who specialises in ripping yarns of war and espionage, full of sympathy and comic irony, which read like thrillers yet thrive on fact. Soon after the Hampstead party, Fuchs was recruited by Soviet military intelligence, to which he passed notes about fission in the uranium isotope U-235, usually by means of circuitous taxi rides or in parcels left on ...”

“... Diana Dors, Eric Morecambe, John Betjeman and William Walton. Dors has a leering ‘Come up and read me sometime’ expression on her face and Niven wears his yacht-club greeter’s smile. Morecambe seems to be laughing at one of his own jokes. Amiable images, devised no doubt to lure us into a placidly elegiac mood: death can’t be all that bad if it gets ...”