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“... 1945 general election, he accused Labour of planning Gestapo-like tactics? I was not aware before reading the letters just how warmly and cordially the Churchills, particularly Clementine, felt about Mussolini. Writing from the British Embassy in Rome in March 1926, she says: He is most impressive – quite simple – natural, very dignified, has a charming ...”

“... who pulled a copy of his father’s book from his sea chest and lent it to Melville. ‘The reading of this wondrous story upon the landless sea, & close to the very latitude of the shipwreck had a surprising effect upon me.’ Melville never knew that he was mistaken in thinking he had seen Owen Chase. Chase had gone back to sea as a whaling captain ...”

“... at the LSE and then at Leeds University. I don’t remember ever seeing a photograph of him or reading an interview with him. It is said that when the LSE was occupied by its students in the late Sixties he called upon them to evacuate in the name of revolutionary discipline. An uncompromising dogmatist, Miliband has never set store by the Labour Party or ...”

“... émigré organisations as they competed for CIA largesse makes dismal, though at times risible, reading. The émigrés used all sorts of unscrupulous tricks to do one another down and monopolise American handouts, denouncing rivals as Soviet agents (which some of them evidently were) while lying brazenly about their contacts in the current Soviet Union and ...”

“... on as usual. Names central to Renaissance scholarship appear on page after page – Thomas More, Peter Giles, Martin Dorpius, Pirckheimer, Amerbach, Tunstall, Lascaris, Zazius. So do the names of people for whom Erasmus scholars feel especial warmth – Grocyn, say, or William Warham, the Archbishop of Canterbury, who put up with a great deal, for Erasmus ...”

“... to be, or wanted to be seen to be, by herself in particular. Such choices, she would have found by reading Confessions, are utterly spurious; indeed to think of one’s life in terms of them is just one more sign of corruption. You read Confessions to find out what it is to become and to be a believer. To live a life in which there is nothing but God. ‘All ...”

“... Russia, where it won two literary prizes, and in Germany. One explanation for this may be that the reading public has a greater appetite for experimental fiction than the cynics believe. Another may be the nature of Shishkin’s experiment, which relates to the enclosure, rather than to the entirety of its contents. Difficult as some passages are, there are ...”

“... Peter Redgrove had a secret. It was called ‘the Game’. Sexual in nature, this obsessive ritual ignited some of his most arresting poetry, and was vital to his personal mythology for sixty years. Known only to his lovers and a few in his inner circle, the Game has now been made public in Neil Roberts’s remarkable biography of the poet, published almost a decade after Redgrove’s death, along with a new Collected Poems ...”

“... we have yet to meet. ‘I’ is a textual version of Milan Kundera, author of the novel we are reading, and (in Immortality) of other, mentioned novels, Life is elsewhere, for example. He is not of course writing before our very eyes, and he is not exactly reporting on the way he writes. He is miming the art of the novel, producing a picture of the sort of ...”

“... a dodgy stockbroker? Yes, it was the man in the runcible hat, Edward Lear. His latest biographer, Peter Levi, confides to us that, like Lear’s mother, his own grandmother also had 21 children. Easily lured into digression, Levi adds that ‘it is not uncommon in such families that by some mysterious compensation of nature a number of the children or ...”

“... and appropriate, that people will always refer to Scott Moncrieff when they speak seriously about reading Proust in English, but I’m not sure that a new translation has to ‘better’ his version, conspicuously or not. It’s unfortunate that neither Hazzard nor the editors at Farrar, Straus remembered that Prendergast’s first name is Christopher rather ...”

“... amount of time Bill had ever spent alone with his father. He had brought a book, and despite not reading it or even flicking through its pages, had preserved an air of intent throughout the journey, gripping it tightly in both hands so that the spine and the far edge of the cover were darkened by sweat. If his father noticed this, he gave no sign. He had a ...”

“... exercised over me little of the magic it has for so many others, including Kavenna and Peter Davidson. ‘The Idea of North’ was the Canadian pianist Glenn Gould’s phrase and the title of a radio documentary he made. ‘I have an enormous compulsion to look upon the polar seas,’ he wrote to a friend in 1965, ‘and I find that this is growing ...”

“... for a surrogate mother in every relationship,’ says Elizabeth Sweeting). His ‘marriage’ to Peter Pears, begun shortly after Mrs Britten’s death, may be partly understood in this light (Pears’s singing voice, it was noted, was uncannily similar to Mrs Britten’s), as may his lifelong willingness to be looked after, sometimes dominated, by a series ...”

“... at exactly the same moment.’ A ceiling fan is rattling slightly in the room in which I am reading Dehaene’s book. I think I can process the word ‘occupied’ – the last word I read before putting the book aside for a moment – while also taking in the rattle. Can I really? It does take a certain kind of settling-in, but there they are, the two ...”