“... immigrants, and in the late 1950s the couple moved to a three-bedroom colonial house in Cherry Hill, New Jersey, which is fairly close to Philadelphia. Everyone you ask speaks of the Spahrs as a classic American postwar family, moderately affluent and natively tough, putting great stock in education, sports, mealtimes, prayers, memories, and earning ...”

“... best-known practitioners – all men of the same generation, born in the mid to late 1960s – are Michael Chabon, Junot Díaz and Jonathan Lethem. The books they wrote were interested in popular culture or counterculture as much as in the thoughts and passions of characters. Chabon’s The Amazing Adventures of Kavalier & Clay (2000) chronicled the rise of ...”

“... strongest, most lasting influences.’ Readers might wonder where the poetry of Hughes, Heaney or Hill would be without some filtering of the tradition of Old English accentual poetry through Auden or Hopkins. Hopkins’s use of Old English is well-known (‘a vastly superior thing to what we have now’), but perhaps not the fact that Engels read Old English ...”

“... paedophile, martyr, traitor, major minor writer. In an Omnibus programme broadcast late last year, Michael Bracewell claimed that he was ‘the century’s first pop celebrity’, and tried to persuade us that, in the manner of an Elvis or a McCartney, Wilde was a working-class lad made good. Cut to a shot of Bracewell looking uncomfortable in a gargoyled ...”

“... experience, the Canadian Department of National Defence commissioned a report, written by Roger Hill, and cited in Soldiers of Diplomacy. Its conclusions have not dated: ‘The UN has virtually no planning mechanism in New York to analyse past experience, monitor current operations or plan for future peacekeeping forces.’ It has ‘proceeded by a process ...”

“... a bibliography. He is what he watches, late at night. Charles Hawtrey, in his youthful pomp, in Michael Powell’s A Canterbury Tale. Hawtrey (pre-booze) with Will Hay. James Fox’s strangulated Elephant and Castle in Performance. Hitchcock’s expressionist version of The Thirty-Nine Steps. Seabrook’s work, before the wonderful accident of All the ...”

“... established the Clinic for the Treatment and Study of Nervous and Difficult Children in Notting Hill. The child didn’t replace the neurotic; the neurotic re-emerged within the child.Klein’s model of the mind disorganised the difference between childhood and adulthood. Her eventual understanding of the mental positions between which we continually ...”

“... of shamanism could be integrated into the modern quest for self-actualisation. The anthropologist Michael Harner, who studied and drank ayahuasca with Shipibo-Conibo and Jívaro shamans in the Upper Amazon and taught at Berkeley and elsewhere, boiled his experiences and Eliade’s theories down to a programme he called ‘core shamanism’, which became a ...”

“... study can stand by Deryck Cooke’s magisterial I saw the world end (1979) and the long essay by Michael Tanner in the Faber Wagner Companion (1979). The other three recent books are built on shakier foundations. Ewans, the author of a fine study of Janáček’s operas, here traces the allegedly strong Aeschylean influence on Wagner, while Furness and ...”

“... Keneally anatomises historical Australia by plucking from its origins a strange factual nugget. Michael Ondaatje does something similar for Canada with a wispy succession of word paintings eerily evocative of a past he cannot have known but can magically conjure. His prose is consciously poetic and at first sight seems more conditioned by the need to ...”

“... loved, as his several ventures into poetry confirm: Low lies their home ’mongst many a hill, In fruitful and deep delved womb; A little village, safe, and still, Where pain and vice full seldom come, Not horrid noise of warlike drum. Shepherds who pipe on about their loves and their sheep and lead lives magically in tune with an idyllic and ...”

“... in trepidation and worked towards with confidence. Unless, which seems unlikely, Montale wrote a hill of material in the very year of his death, there is not much that escapes its purview. It contains all the poems, all the variants which led up to the established texts, and a closely relevant selection from the poet’s prose, ranging from pertinent ...”

“... for his own work, and the start of an important – perhaps his most important – friendship. Michael Ramsbotham was also a writer, five years younger than Henry Reed, and from a more privileged background. After Charterhouse, from which he was expelled, he went up to King’s College, Cambridge. At the end of his second year, in June 1940, he was called ...”

“... just behave with politeness – for the rest – she’s had it.’ In his biography of Williams, Michael Freedland gives a fuller account of this incident. He explains the basis of the sketch – two spies complaining about the uselessness of their technical gadgetry – and quotes Fenella Fielding: ‘We both had death pills. I would die first leaving him ...”

“... produced by ‘genteelisms’: ‘a forty-minute hike brought the dog and I to the top of the hill.’ A belated disciple of Fowler, Amis abhors Elegant Variation: ‘If the President seemed to support the Radicals in New York, in Washington he appeared to back the Conservatives.’ This is not only Elegant Variation but Pointless Chiasmus, a crime I have ...”