“... subdue to itself, whatever it received into its bosom; and in no language has this confidence been more fully justified by the result.’ Shame and anxiety over the gallimaufry that is the English lexicon was replaced with triumphalism and self-congratulation: so it remains today. It’s no secret that modern English is saturated with French. Insults and ...”

“... and reality is under assault. The photographing of children in the nude is often prosecuted more vigorously than actual child abuse. The media and the academy waste endless hours debating the morality of politically correct language, while the economic inequality suffered by minorities remains unaffected. ‘Rap music is really rape music,’ say some ...”

“... Creation to the 4004th year before Christ, and Noah’s flood to the 2349th. And five years later Thomas Stanley published a thorough revision of Diogenes Laertius entitled The History of Philosophy, revealing that he too was a date-freak. He moaned tetchily about traditional ‘anachronisms’, such as Diogenes’ alleged ‘anachronism of one year’ in ...”

“... a Bus, Ship, Rail and Air Travel Guide. The travel guide, his Urfaust, is the progenitor of ever more fantastic and unpublishable compendia, sketches for an ultimate timetable in which travel data would unlock the doors to all human knowledge. Scham’s Utopian travel encyclopedia, which owes less to Bradshaw than to Flaubert’s Bouvard and Pècuchet, is ...”

“... long, elegant fingers that were always flying upward) to hide a beautiful gap-toothed smile. (Thomas Victor’s photograph, reproduced on the dust-jacket of the Collected, catches the smile convincingly.) Salter also fills in, for Clampitt’s new readers, the moral background to the poems. It was Quakers who had settled New Providence, but a ...”

“... she writes some funny passages about his frustrated political ambitions in Washington, and an even more entertaining satire of her egocentric and capricious mistress, especially of an incident in which cosmetic powder turns the woman’s face black and leads to her being mistaken for a Negro. The humiliated family retreats from Washington to North ...”

“... was carefully trained in the art of letter writing. His bedroom, according to his early biographer Thomas Moffet, ‘overflowed with elegant epistles’ which he had painstakingly written. The opening letter in Roger Kuin’s superb new edition of his correspondence, addressed to the 12-year-old Philip by his father, Sir Henry, urges him ‘to exercise that ...”

“... might have been called Christianity in the East – with reference to John Bossy’s brilliant and more wide-ranging anatomy of late medieval religion, Christianity in the West (1985). The Stripping of the Altars was one of those rare books which have the power radically to alter our understanding of a large piece of the past. When A.G. Dickens published The ...”

“... filmmakers. The novelist Cesare Pavese went so far as to compare De Sica, perhaps ironically, with Thomas Mann, as the author of a national narrative. Had movies superseded literature? The Futurists thought so, proposing in one 1916 manifesto a cinema that would ‘co-operate in the general renewal, taking the place of the literary review (always pedantic) and ...”

“... of rapidly diminishing respectability. His father was a whisky salesman who drank a good deal more than he ever managed to sell. When things got especially bad, Sinclair’s mother would seek refuge in the home of her own father, who was secretary-treasurer of the Western Maryland Railroad, or that of her sister, who was married to one of the richest men ...”

“... pen. At best, he could switch to Danish; early on, Laxness tried this. All his life, he was much more involved with translations of his work than most writers. He was an obsessive, a struggler, a megalomaniac. ‘It is unlucky for a writer to be born in a tiny isolated country, condemned to a language that no one understands,’ he wrote. ‘But one day I ...”

“... right from the days of myth. Then they parted, like a nagging married couple, with Aristotle and Thomas Aquinas and that beastly Kant. So the novel went sloppy and philosophy went abstract-dry. The two should come together again – in the novel. Why in the novel? ‘You may know a truth but if it’s at all complicated you have to be an artist not to utter ...”

“... and eventually runs its course ‘until the victim comes out the other end of his nightmare more or less intact. In the meantime, however, it’s Auschwitz time in the heart of the soul – a form of madness I wouldn’t wish upon a literary critic.’ A few years later Styron wrote about his bout with what Churchill called ‘the black dog’ in a ...”

“... gravity. He wrote to his sister Peggy: It will, I rather think, make Uncle Henry count very much more than he did already. For it’s full of literature as well as character. In fact I suspect that these letters will become, in the history of English literature, not only one of the half-dozen greatest epistolary classics, but a sort of milestone – the last ...”

“... republicanism in recent years might be thought to have stimulated interest in Milton, but here Thomas Corns, editor of A Companion to Milton, sounds a warning note. This collection of essays, he writes, appears at a time when Milton’s standing with a wide readership appears ‘altogether more insecure’. In the US ...”