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“... 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 ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... had been evinced by several of its members, including Nina Searl, Ella Sharpe, Susan Isaacs, Donald Winnicott and Barbara Low). Ernest Jones, the President and later Freud’s biographer, was enthusiastic (‘absolutely heart-and-soul whole-hogging pro-Melanie’, according to James Strachey). In July 1925 Klein visited London to give a course of ...”

“... new biography, enter his trance, and suddenly transform himself uninhibitedly into Mickey or Donald or an owl or an old hunting dog . . . ‘He would imitate the expressions of the dog, and look from one side to the other, and raise first one brow and then the other’ . . . ‘You’d have the feeling of the whole thing,’ Dick Huemer ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... Auden never again wrote as well in America as he had written in England in the wretched Thirties. Donald Davie hasn’t wanted to come out to play with the ludic Auden of The Shield of Achilles: ‘The form of the Bucolics – improvisation turned inside out – was a good idea, but it let him in for the other thing he has to guard against, pirouetting and ...”

“... When I read for the English Bar in the 1960s, the legal history lecturer stopped when he reached 1649 and explained that he was now moving directly to 1660, because everything that had happened between the trial of the king and the restoration of the monarchy was a nullity. By this simple and efficient process John Cooke, the barrister who prosecuted Charles I, has been airbrushed from history, save by a handful of historians of the trial who have written him off as a hack ...”

“... jacket campily bathetic. He was nervous about the book’s reception, though it had already been read appreciatively by eminent friends, including Ashbery and Nabokov, who once listed it as one of the few contemporary novels he liked. The book was reviewed in the New York Times by Alan Friedman, the author of a forgotten novel called Hermaphrodeity, who ...”

“... on the orders of President Warren Harding.Debs won 3.4 per cent of the vote in that election, but Donald Trump is currently polling ahead of Joe Biden in five of the six states he needs if he is to win 270 electoral college votes on 5 November. The Republican primary electorate wants Trump, even though the former South Carolina governor, Nikki Haley, has at ...”

“... who appears on our television screens defining the limits of his editors’ freedom. We do not read of attempts by anonymous senior executives at News International to suppress comment or sack editors who have infringed unwritten company policy, but of swashbuckling, tough-talking Rupert. It is Robert Maxwell, not his BPCC, who is perpetually on the ...”

“... here. Dr McKitterick remains firmly earthbound. Sometimes this can be useful. It is refreshing to read about Charlemagne’s coronation in Rome without being weighed down by debates on the massive, if nebulous significance of this for the future, but her refusal to accord any real significance to contemporary imperial ideology means that her account of ...”

“... with the demise of the Labour Government, the Communist culprits were hunted down. Guy Burgess and Donald Maclean fled to Russia in 1951; Kim Philby was finally exposed in 1963; Anthony Blunt in 1979. The first three took refuge in Russia. Blunt died in disgrace, deserted both by the Leftist friends of his youth and by the Royal Family and his colleagues in ...”