“... of female nakedness – whether imagined or real, as on the moving and perfectly phrased last page of Back – are never lubricious; there’s no sound of the voyeur’s heavy breathing. The Keatsian shyness of Green’s adolescent thoughts about women, as recorded in Pack My Bag, always in some sense remained, even though, as he also says ...”

“... form, class background, internal audience, degree of famousness, external audience, media ecology, page layout, news events, readerly predilection and timing. Many of his poems return to the feedback loops between sincere emotion and its preconditions. In ‘A Private Bottling’, a boozer spends the night drinking his way through different whiskies, lovingly ...”

“... more children in quick succession, he kept on writing and performing, finished the eight-hundred page manuscript of his autobiographical novel, Seeds of Man, moved to California, met another woman, divorced Marjorie, married again, divorced again, and then the dreaded Huntington’s caught up with him. He didn’t die until 1967, but the 1950s and 1960s were ...”

“... seething at a ‘diversity’ ethos that they perceive as lowering standards. A recent front-page article in the New York Times referred to Gay’s ‘tepid response to antisemitism on campus’ and her ‘disastrous’ congressional testimony. This is now the received version of her performance – an assessment which, if accurate, might well seem to ...”

“... century and earlier. The English were hopeless, a pathetic mixture of incompetence and arrogance. Alan of Galloway, with his two hundred ships, was the great warrior of the 13th century, Edward I, ‘Hammer of the Scots’, by contrast a buffoon who built his castles in the wrong place as the result of a failure to understand sea-power. Bannockburn and Edward ...”

“... for the comic-strip version of A la recherche (the first few frames from which are reproduced on page 10). Certainly the French weren’t, as Alan Riding’s recent report in the New York Times suggests. Or some of the French weren’t. The critic in the Figaro thought Stéphane Heuet’s graphic version of ...”

“... it has proved to be so in the case of Saussure. Kirsch, however, has one very dependable witness, Alan Ansen, who was soon to become the poet’s secretary. Ansen was an exceptionally alert, well-read note-taker, but he missed a few of the lectures, and for them the editor has to turn to the much less reliable Howard Griffin (who also, in his turn, became ...”

“... him.’ From Salieri’s point of view, Les Danaïdes was an unqualified success. On the title-page of the score, printed in Paris shortly after the first performance, Salieri’s name stands alone. Its prominent dedicatory letter, addressed to the Emperor’s sister, Marie Antoinette, ingeniously plays out a further trope on the ‘sous la dictée de ...”

“... comprehensive study rather poses the question of whether there is anything left to say. ‘Alan Taylor has been the subject of two good biographies,’ Chris Wrigley writes in his preface. ‘Perhaps, in the centenary year of his birth, there is room for a third.’ Perhaps. But whatever commemorations and retrospectives 2006 brought, the rediscovery ...”

“... Bletchley Park to enable the British to regain the upper hand in the cryptographic struggle is not Alan Turing, however, but a neurotic Cambridge mathematician who fancies girls: Tom Jericho’s heart has been broken by a cruel, icy blonde who has mysteriously gone missing from Bletchley. Investigating her disappearance, Jericho also finds time to solve the ...”

“... more explicit involvements with queer sexuality, paganism and utopian politics). There is also an Alan Watts name-drop and a lot of talk about Buddhism.It isn’t easy, reading the early pages of Travels over Feeling, to hang on to the timeline of Russell’s steep developmental itinerary. Some of this blurriness is characteristic of the man, but some is the ...”

“... are the cranes of Liverpool docks. The picture is the heart, or the hinge, of the book. Over the page, the next New Brighton image, taken only four years later, in colour, seems to come from a different age. Time and Parr’s career pick up speed together.The use of colour was one reason The Last Resort was controversial. It was not the medium for serious ...”

“... of his death at the age of 11 in 1596. Graham Holderness rises to this challenge with an eight-page meditation centred on the echo of ‘Hamnet’ in ‘Hamlet’: the names have no etymological link, but one senses their emotional assonance, to which the old theatrical tradition that Shakespeare acted the part of Hamlet’s ghostly father (first mentioned ...”

“... and orchestra – and The Rose Lake (a fifth symphony for orchestra in all but name) flew off the page with improvisational abandon.Oliver Soden​ was born in 1990, and his Life of Tippett is refreshingly free of old prejudices and stale arguments. (The previous standard text, Ian Kemp’s Tippett: The Composer and His Music, was sketchy on biographical ...”

“... though they were picked principally for their skill at chess. One of them, another Kingsman, was Alan Turing, who, with Gordon Welchman of Sidney Sussex, was foremost among those who decoded Ultra, encyphered on the Enigma machine, and, perhaps more than any single person, helped to save us from defeat in the battle of the Atlantic. When suddenly Japanese ...”