“... civilisation. This new understanding of Sign – as any of the natural and regional sign languages may be called – matters to all of us. It will, I think, have profound effects on what future generations think that language ‘is’. In speaking of ‘natural’ languages I mean just that: languages that evolve in the ways in which spoken languages do, but ...”

“... until you try to do it.’ In 1977, when this comment was first published, some younger readers may have asked themselves: W.C. Who? Typically, this was not a forced, would-be trendy allusion to current vogues of popular culture in the electronic media but an authentically personal image, implicitly framed in nostalgia. Nothing odd about that from an Oxford ...”

“... complex: Oedipus was innocent. The juxtaposition of the Oedipus myth with an anti-semitic text may seem far-fetched, but it is given some justification by the conflation of Oedipus and Judas Iscariot in medieval Christianity. In the life of St Matthew in the Golden Legend, Judas’s parents are warned of their son’s future role, and set the infant adrift ...”

“... at the age of 37. In 1789 a letter to the depressing Cornish vicar William Temple reports: ‘I may have many gratifications but the comfort of life is at an end.’ His friend and master, Samuel Johnson, is dead. His ‘valuable spouse’, a spouse much deserted, has just suffered a slow and harrowing death from consumption, and he has to contend with ...”

“... It is compelled to cry out for some notion of what lies in store. And the answers to such cries may be terribly influential, as well as wrong. This is the real reason the curious activity of prophecy counts for so much. The most garbled, or even insane, forecast can end up moving things in one direction rather than another. Illusions, too, ...”

“... debt-ridden lawyer-politician from achieving his potential income. Indeed, ‘O’Connell may well have had more at stake in the Catholic question, materially speaking, than any other person in the United Kingdom.’ His resentment was both intensified and balanced by a remarkable self-confidence, and MacDonagh is particularly good at showing how the ...”

“... On 9 May 1933, A.E. Housman, Professor of Latin at Trinity College, Cambridge, and a scholar worshipped and hated for his meticulous standards and his appalling sarcasms on the unscholarly, delivered the Leslie Stephen Lecture on ‘The Name and Nature of Poetry’. In the course of it he quoted ‘O mistress mine, where are you roaming?’ and he quoted it as ‘where art thou roaming?’ He had omitted to verify his memory of something so well-known ...”

“... of their existence. I know because I was once interviewed for MI6 without realising it. (Or it may have been for the Information Research Department.) It was when I was about to graduate from Cambridge, and a fellow of my college suggested I try. Only on his death much later did I learn, from his obituary, of his MI6 connections. By then, complaints had ...”

“... in his correspondence, that this Byron fixation has something to do with bisexuality – which may mean that ‘Lisztomania’, Heine’s term for crazed female devotion to the virtuoso, had a lot in common with the ‘fag-hag’ devotion previously inspired by castrati. By, say, a singer like Farinelli. Both performers did seemingly impossible ...”

“... of past blindness and Victorian prejudices: offering his edition of a Wordsworth Prelude that may never fully have come into being and whose brief existence, if it had one, is beyond proof, Duncan Wu reminds us once more of the insubstantiality of any claim to know just what Wordsworth was about. Wordsworth’s textual being and meaning changed ...”

“... up flares of his own. Yet these lights and shadows leave some objects shrouded in darkness. One may read widely in Jameson in particular without coming across a description of political equality or freedom, or any non-capitalist ideal he thinks might now be carried over from theory into practice; and when his statements of solidarity do emerge, they quickly ...”

“... back, ‘Greetings from the famous son of a famous father,’ to which Dedalus responds: ‘Who may he be?’ Stephen, 46/41, walking along Sandy-mount Strand: Unwholesome sandflats waited to suck his treading soles, breathing upward sewage breath. Gabler changes the stop to a comma, and adds: ‘a pocket of seaweed smouldered in sea-fire under a midden ...”

“... but himself’), and his sponsor David Pryce-Jones now finds F.R. Leavis much the same, so it may be legitimate to cite the famous excoriation of Bloomsbury that was voiced by Lawrence and amplified by Leavis: ‘they talked endlessly, but endlessly – and never, never a good thing said. They are cased each in a hard littte shell of his own and out of ...”

“... seems, that certain subjects are inevitably more interesting than others, however much we may protest that they are merely different? For instance, does Robert Lowell’s Life Studies intrigue us more than, say, Tony Harrison’s family reminiscences in Continuous? If so, is it because Lowell’s technique is more sophisticated and fluid than ...”

“... satisfactorily described. The consumption of all kinds of book is problematic. Purchased books may not be read; books which are read may be taken or mistaken in a multitude of ways. There is no ratings system which will tell us for books, as for television, what gratifies and what does not. All we have are the crude and ...”