“... 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 ...”

“... J.S.Henslow as early as November 1839.) The importance of the Correspondence clearly lies in a more broadly defined social area. The second volume (like the first) is meticulously edited; the notes themselves provide an embarras de richesses, with enough arcane detail to keep scholars busy for a decade. Over a quarter of the tome is taken up by ...”

“... Lulworth, I left behind the yellow fields of EEC oil seed rape and travelled up onto the rougher, more English ground of Povington Hill. The heath still resembles the one Thomas Hardy imagined as Lear’s, but it is now part of the Royal Armoured Corps’s gunnery range: enclosed and blasted in a new sense. The road goes up ...”

“... why he had concluded his celebrated Lectures on Psychical Research: ‘For my own part I should be more annoyed than surprised if I should find myself in some sense persisting immediately after the death of my present body.’ I do hope he is not now passing his post-mortem retirement in the great caravan site in the sky. But the evidence, in so far as it ...”

“... Salinger. Keepers of the Flame is a further cogitation on the woes of biography, this time in a more objectively historical context. Hamilton offers 22 case studies, from John Donne – the first properly biographed English author – to Philip Larkin of last month’s Observer fame. Hamilton could not, if he tried, write an unreadable book. Keepers of the ...”

“... was a good boy, he should be given his degree. Then in the late January of 1592, he had got into a more spectacular kind of trouble: he was deported from the Dutch town of Flushing, accused of coining. In London he was interviewed by Burghley, the Lord Treasurer; though coining was a capital offence, he cannot have served ...”

“... The whole nasty episode situates Pickles in the body of judges who send women to prison more often and for longer than men with similar records who are convicted of similar offences, and the rest of the book shows why. ‘One woman told me she hated Page Three as she had had a mastectomy. This is the key to female condemnation of nude ...”

“... to last only thirty or forty years, but now seeing the prospect of living ‘a hundred years or more’ if only he could produce that ‘infallible’ system of medicine he was known to be searching for. He tried to dampen some of the wilder expectations of what he was on the verge of achieving: he said that while he could not promise ‘to render a man ...”

“... out complex arrangements of the most exotic trees and plants. Like his Norfolk contemporary Sir Thomas Browne, he admired the fact that a tree could ‘generate its like without violation of Virginity’. But he was no Swampy or tree-hugger. His plans for giant plantations of trees had a military and industrial purpose: they were eventually to be felled to ...”

“... hero; Agustín de Iturbide, the Mexican; Emperor Pedro I of Brazil; and, finally, Admiral Lord Thomas Cochrane, the astonishing Scottish maverick who played a key part in the liberation of Peru and the consolidation of Brazilian independence. It was not fashionable in the later 20th century to see history in terms of its great men. Yet however ...”

“... myths and ‘challenging’ stereotypes sometimes just makes the myths and stereotypes look more secure. Philip Parker’s title, The Northmen’s Fury, suggests a return to the 19th-century view – hair, beards and horned helmets – but his subtitle, ‘A History of the Viking World’, more accurately describes ...”