“... 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 ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... through what was then the conventional musical education – nor, indeed, would he have if he had read Classics at one of the universities. In Germany, he might have gained more insight into historical method by attending a university, but there too, in the mid-century, musical scholarship was in the hands of amateurs – men such as Winterfeld and ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... to be an American, Chris Shull, born in Philadelphia and raised in Maryland. In 1999, long before Donald Trump openly coveted Greenland, Shull was called to preach in a place where there were no Baptists, a place he knew nothing about. ‘I just started praying about a place where God would want me to go,’ he said when we sat down to talk the next ...”

“... Some of these problems are discussed by Brian Whitaker in News Ltd: Why you can’t read all about it. While it is mainly an account of the attempt of the Liverpool Free Press to provide a radical local newspaper (which richly deserved to succeed), it is also a trenchant statement of the radicals’ case against the claim that something ...”

“... sequences: Acrylic Tips is, I think, a truly horrible book, violent, liverish, and unpleasant to read and to write about … garish, lurid, unsettling, and to me full of a vivid and threatening bodily trauma. Not only does it leave me indignant, dumbstruck and annoyed, it makes me feel unwell … For a sequence full of imperative, of the noises of ...”

“... difficult: it is poetry almost entirely without charm. On first learning that his work was being read outside a small circle of poet friends, Fisher froze up for an extended period of time, as he would periodically throughout his writing life. There isn’t much in the poetry that would provide fuel for the more significant engines of reputation. It is too ...”

“... of the subject is the Book of British Birds, and you have a rough idea of what it feels like to read Richard Dawkins on theology. Card-carrying rationalists like Dawkins, who is the nearest thing to a professional atheist we have had since Bertrand Russell, are in one sense the least well-equipped to understand what they castigate, since they don’t ...”

“... publishers, who have produced a tome so stoutly handsome that it’s hard to tear the pages out to read the texts as broadsides. An unsewn paperback would ease this problem. That aside, Vendler’s difficulties are ponderable. Though anthologies have a long history, no principles for ordering them have ever been settled. Whether arranged alphabetically by ...”