“... dose of romanticism. The young men who donned red shirts and joined Garibaldi’s expedition in May 1860 had heads full of poetry, Classical mythology and Verdi’s music. Giuseppe Cesare Abba, 21 when he sailed with ‘The Thousand’, has left a record of his exalted state of mind not only during the voyage but during the entire campaign – an exaltation ...”

“... Evelyn Waugh never wanted to be a writer, still less a novelist. That may explain both the weakness of his books and their remarkable and continuing popularity. Readers love an amateur with no intellectual pretensions – one of themselves, in fact – who is also an expert craftsman: and Waugh’s novels are as solidly made as the best furniture ...”

“... Such a tendency will not be confined, I believe, to the other side of the Irish Sea. In future, we may need to distinguish Modern English literature, a Romantic offshoot of the same type and vintage as Irish, Scottish and American literature, from an older English literature as well as from the generic subject of Literature in English. In other words, the ...”

“... Film Censorship is a splendid state document and worthy of its difficult subject.* This reviewer may take pride in the fact that the report bears the marks of having been in part written by, and supervised by, a philosopher, the chairman of the Committee, Bernard Williams. Philosophy does many things, some plainly useful and some rather remote from common ...”

“... The story is simple but compelling. Indeed, it may well be called ‘prodigious’, a term which is prominent on the title-page of the account of the case published in 1561. Martin Guerre was a peasant, of Basque origin but settled in the village of Artigat in the French South-West, between Toulouse and Foix. He married a local girl, Bertrande de Rols, when they were in their early teens; ten years later, he disappeared ...”

“... passing judgment on his characters with such solemn self-assurance, as from a Jacobean pulpit. It may be that the vengeful, conceited, ludicrous monologues of the appalling Croucher represent a form of self-parody. In our next three novels, all candidates for the bestseller list, the wacky, wonderful world of Washington DC and its heroic Press Corps is laid ...”

“... and the virtual defeat of most of the important bacterialdiseases.’ Whatever the general public may have thought about him, Florey stood unsurpassably high in the estimation of his colleagues – that which meansmost to a scientist – and in due course they elected him head of their profession in England as President of the Royal Society.It is fortunate ...”

“... between the Somme and Passchendaele, but Lawrence asked only that ‘the bitterness of the war may be taken for granted in the characters.’ Birkin enraged by ‘the disgrace of outspread London’ is not the same as his creator enraged by the disgrace of the Western Front. Lawrence’s point, of course, was that London and the Western Front were part of ...”

“... armed force. ‘Even the caterer ... was kept in the dark until the last minute.’ You also, you may protest, have been to weddings where the caterer has seemed to be taken by surprise. But we are not talking here about a cock-up with the vol-au-vents. We are talking about something on the lines of Belshazzar’s feast: but more lavish, and more ...”

“... ambition, really, as somebody like Mailer would define it. The yearned-for bays are withered; they may even turn out to be made of plastic – withered plastic, if this boy’s luck runs true to form. Larkin knew himself to be the champ – but he knew also that he was a small-time, local sort of champ. He was unlikely to make it in the heavyweight ...”

“... The prose here was wartime homesickness, commonplace as well as painful, but the poetry has what may now seem a slightly dated exactness and elegance, learned in part from Auden. Fuller was well known in the early Forties as a war poet, and there was a great demand for war poets. The experiences offered by the Navy were for the most part strictly ...”

“... or if it does, whether he is not asking himself if his instinctive personal reaction to a question may not be misguided or inadequate. Sometimes the message emerges from the dialogue itself, as the characters combine to build up a collective understanding of which each would have been incapable in isolation. None of this makes it possible to present Diderot as ...”

“... Lives of the Poets, though Johnson says his diction was ‘florid and luxuriant ... and sometimes may be charged with filling the ear more than the mind.’ Without comparing the two Thomsons, Leonard shows by quotation that the Victorian (1834-82) is the greater poet. He shows, too, that the later Thomson’s life reflects the state of Britain more fully ...”

“... based on fact’. As for Leonowens, by calling her second book The Romance of the Harem, she may well have meant to signal that the work was best not approached too literally. That her preface nonetheless insisted on the truthfulness of her tales should not necessarily cost her her novelist’s licence, since as Susan Morgan observes, ‘there is a long ...”

“... in the past). On historical precedent, Waterstone’s should win; but, like Barnes and Noble, it may lose the next battle. Smith’s and Waterstone’s are fighting a civil war, while the real enemy invades from cyberspace. Amazon.com began as a one-man operation in a garage three years ago. The garage-owning founder (now chief executive officer), Jeff (now ...”