“... Review’ at all?He died in 1973 and the magazine started in 1974. We had pieces about him. John Fuller was a great admirer. I’m not sure if he wrote of him in the magazine but there were things about Auden. We also had a lot of literary reminiscences in which he figured.Speaking earlier about the business side of the magazine, you made light of ...”

“... mid-Sixties we began to make a swap in the evening and thus became acquainted with the writing of John Healy in the Backbencher column of that newspaper. He wrote every week about a new breed of Fianna Fail politician. He wrote with wit and irreverence, but he wrote from the inside and he conferred a huge glamour on the young ministers in Lemass’s ...”

“... epileptics began to hide themselves from public view, or else, as in the case of Prince John, the epileptic fifth son of George V, they were hidden away by their families. The rise of eugenics made things much worse. Eugenicists fixated on epilepsy as a hereditary threat to be tackled by both negative and positive countermeasures. By 1914, 13 US ...”

“... is the 16th book about Laurence Olivier, and his foreword tells of two more biographers, John Cottrell and Garry O’Connor, too intent on their own deadlines to discuss their common quarry with him. All this activity may puzzle the lay person. Holden’s final pages report Olivier alive, as well as can be expected at 81, residing tranquilly in the ...”

“... is Coetzee’s most explicit attack on the unhealthiness of non-integration. The idea is given fuller treatment in his next book, Foe, where the silent other who resists interpretation is Friday. In Coetzee’s reworking of Robinson Crusoe, the tale of Cruso’s island kingdom is told to the famous man of letters, Daniel Foe, by Susan Barton, a castaway ...”

“... light, the landscape is changing, but remaining the same. What is being revealed is merely a fuller essence of the same landscape, as the light builds – ‘a morning of primroses’, culminating in Lawrence’s realisation that the hepatica looks like the blue sky that has finally cleared above the writer’s head. We move into ‘clarity’. And this ...”

“... the Spirit of Ecstasy, a juvenile descendant of the Winged Victory, also closely related to Loie Fuller and Peter Pan, first perched upon the bonnet of a Rolls-Royce. By the Thirties architecture had begun to envy the sleek and aggressive forms employed in modern cars and ocean liners especially. We can see this from the spectacular perspectives hanging on ...”

“... screen of hysteria blots out the folded hemlocks.’ It was decades later that poets such as John Ashbery or Paul Muldoon helped Anglophone poetry to a convincing use of Surrealist licence for its own ways and meanings. In any case, at the end of the Thirties Gascoyne himself had effectively abandoned Surrealism, and with it ‘The Rites of ...”

“... portrait has is ‘character’, she notes briskly, something altogether different from John Singer Sargent’s vapid sitters. Here the critic’s way of looking ‘as a woman’ means fully recognising Cassatt’s achievement in bringing ignored and devalued female subject-matter into the painting of modern life – the world of upper-class ...”

“... These tokens of delegated power signify to insiders who really matters and who does not. Craig Fuller and Richard Darman who prepare agenda for two of Reagan’stop advisers put it neatly in an interview with the Los Angeles Times in October 1981: ‘We can phone anybody who is at a certain level and get them called out of any meeting. Below that level ...”

“... ways and read into it what they would like to find. One reason for this is that, as in the case of John Stuart Mill, a writer with whom one may notice many parallels, there is something of a conflict between heart and head, and between the intellectual positions which logic forces him to accept and the ones with which he feels most at home. Although union ...”

“... novelist has gone unnoted, Gordon refuses to subordinate their story to his; and the result is a fuller and more sympathetic account of Minny Temple’s youthful rebelliousness, for example, or of the mixture of loneliness and prickly independence that characterised Woolson’s life as a writer. The quotations from Minny’s unpublished letters vividly ...”

“... striking attitudes with the duff public art we passed along the way. Our most love to loathe is John Ravera’s In Town, an anodised couple chucking their malshapen baby between them, which stands at the southern end of Battersea Bridge. We stopped at a vintage comic store in Putney where the proprietor, although a ringer for Comic Book Guy in The ...”

“... from different periods and places, from Cairo to India: it would have been good to have a much fuller account of why it should be favoured, other than for its comprehensiveness. I found that reading the Penguin edition was like going to a new production of Hamlet or Lear: memory stumbles, because bits are missing, dialogue is transposed, and scenes turn up ...”

“... That she was toeing the Party line didn’t occur to me, though it did to my companion, John Scaife, another budding conscript, who was much more scathing on the subject and cynical about the tears. 2 February. Ten days or so ago I did an interview for the Today programme in connection with the revival of The History Boys now playing at ...”