“... mend cars, keep dogs, but still have wondrously youthful chests and are always up for it. Dogs may mark the point at which Sallis and his deconstructed/reinvented crime novel break away from the form as we once knew and loved it. Wasn’t Humphrey Bogart as Roy ‘Mad Dog’ Earle, in Raoul Walsh’s film of W.R. Burnett’s High Sierra, undone by a ...”

“... Slessor’s good works on the Upper Niger still earn her an image on Scottish banknotes, while David Livingstone became the world’s best-known Scotsman. They did not save many souls. After 50 years’ work in India, the missions could show only 3359 converts. But their influence on empire was deep and paradoxical, at once the advance guard of colonialism ...”

“... declares at the start that he knew and liked Trevor-Roper and that in writing this Life ‘I may have been influenced by feelings of loyalty, affection and gratitude.’ He leans towards the ‘fundamentally nice’ view. But the niceness was not apparent to many people, who had to judge Trevor-Roper by what and how he wrote. The prose style he adopted ...”

“... secrecy is that any government which reveals how its predecessors spied upon their own populace may also face some embarrassing queries as to what comparable actions it is getting up to itself today. It is, at first sight, odd that we know a great deal more about the more necessarily secret world of military and foreign intelligence. The reasons for this ...”

“... props are more common and more affecting, chief among them the subject’s hands. One hand alone may clutch the brow (Martin Luther King, 1961), support the whole skull (Cecil Beaton, 1951), point its index finger into the upper lip (Colette, 1952) or into the lower lip (Tony Hancock, 1962), or feel the forelock (Francis Bacon, 1981); two hands ...”

“... Porter’s poem begins by acknowledging separation, remorse, confusion and affection: In wet May, in the months of change, In a country you wouldn’t visit, strange Dreams pursue me in my sleep, Black creatures of the upper deep – Though you are five months dead, I see You in guilt’s iconography, Dear Wife, lost beast, beleaguered child As the poem ...”

“... Fleming’s history is Volume II in the Penguin History of Britain, for which the general editor, David Cannadine, ‘laid down three inviolable rules’: no footnotes, no historiography (that is, no discussion of the ebb and flow of historical opinion), and make it accessible to everyone, general readers, students and professional historians alike (in other ...”

“... of the last half-century’. She certainly had at least two illegitimate children, and Caroline may have been another. It’s possible that her father was the playwright and politician Thomas Brinsley Sheridan. Such parentage would be far more in accordance with Caroline’s character and behaviour than that of her official father. Douglass finds the ...”

“... after all, is a mode modern readers (like Chaucer’s) can cope with. Fictive immediacy may short-circuit by obliterating the mysterious distance of other lives and times. The carefully invented document, on the other hand, the slightly faked and not implausibly revealing memoir, can, when rightly framed, hold moral and formal satisfactions. Such a ...”

“... therefore, a text quite different from that of a novel or an autobiography, even though they may offer some of the same satisfactions. They are less a Greek urn than a heap of shards. All we know of Hardy, moreover, leads us to suspect that, as with Jane Austen and others, some of the letters we should most like to read are missing. In the final ...”

“... file, and some forty thousand of them died. Their sufferings were not mythical: nonetheless, one may question the way their particular sacrifice came to dominate the nation’s collective memory of the war (the memories of France and Germany were quite differently constituted). Still very much an insular nation, Britain could not easily comprehend the extent ...”

“... back to the essay on genres, which in turn sends us out to other poems in the anthology ... There may be other collections of poetry conceived in this way, but I have not come across them; certainly this is a model it would repay any anthologist to study. The embedding of the poetry in its historical and literary context is particularly valuable here, for the ...”

“... illustrates this claim by presenting a poignant vision of the blighting effect the belief that we may be the final generation can have on love, marriage and art, as well as on our social and political relations. It is obvious, however, that this explanation cannot account for the overriding importance which he attributes to ensuring the existence of future ...”

“... with systems designed to suit other people. Install a man in an ill-fitting system, and you may witness that discrepancy between the organic and the mechanical which Bergson regarded as the provocation of comedy. Kenner probably got the hint from Wyndham Lewis: if so, it is explicable that his account of Gulliver’s Travels and Robinson Crusoe makes ...”

“... of the editor, even ‘boredom and emptiness were to be experienced to the full.’ By comparison, David Josephson’s more modest essay on Percy Grainger in Music and Civilisation comes as a refreshing surprise. Josephson is a victim of Lang’s musicological high-mindedness only to the extent that he distrusts any kind of ad hominem argument that could ...”