“... esoteric. (One of the most prominent figures missing from Finkelstein and McCleery’s Reader, David Scott Kastan, has riffed on ‘New Criticism’, ‘New Historicism’ and ‘New Bibliography’ to dub his expertise the ‘New Boredom’.) The New Critics took ‘the poem itself’ where they found it, in cheap paperback reprints available even at ...”

“... aunt. The most important effect was to create a very close bond between Christina and her father, David; but then David Stead remarried. There was a stepmother, and soon a brood of half-brothers and sisters, which grew to number five. Christina felt the gap open between her and the man who had been mother and father; and at ...”

“... if so, in what way? There could be no better place to look for answers to these questions than in David Attwell’s J.M. Coetzee and the Life of Writing. Attwell is an ex-student of Coetzee’s who has already written in defence of his work in J.M. Coetzee: South Africa and the Politics of Writing. He now returns to his subject with the advantage of the ...”

“... them could doubt that the bombers were Syrians and Palestinians. The series, mainly written by David Leppard, who worked closely with the Scottish police team, ended with a scoop: white plastic residue found at Lockerbie was traced back to alarm clocks bought by the Dalkomini gang. There seemed no more room for argument. ‘The Sunday Times ...”

“... to put people right about other people is incorrigible, indeed obsessional. In his review of David Cecil’s biography of Max Beerbohm Malcolm Muggeridge allowed it to be a graceful job of work, but said it missed the real point about Beerbohm and his lifestyle, which was that he concealed his Jewish origins and was a crypto-homosexual. Of ...”

“... part of Molly’s memory of weekend mornings when all four of them – including her husband, David, who is absent through work for most of the novel – would lie together on the big bed: ‘Every single other thing – from the exhaustion of the week to evolution itself – is in the interest of this. This pure lack of desire. The need for absolutely ...”

“... was reticent and barely spoke, but became friends with a fellow student (and fellow photographer), David Armstrong. The camera became a solution to the problems of childhood, of growing up, of what was happening to her now – a way of proving her experiences were real.After leaving Satya, she moved into a flatshare with Armstrong in Boston. Her luminous ...”

“... it … [Blair] cited a New Yorker essay full of barbed quotes about Hillary from [Sally] Quinn and Elizabeth Dole, the senator’s wife, plus a popular new novel about the 1992 election, Primary Colors. All she knew of that book, said Hillary, was that she cussed like a sailor and was portrayed in a graphic one-night stand with George Stephanopoulos, of all ...”

“... correspondent, the role of chief Hollywood inquisitor was assumed by the more combative Julia Elizabeth Baxter. Ellen Scott’s researches in the NAACP archive have revealed that Baxter paid greater attention than White had to the racial caricature latent in cinema’s visual and verbal detail. It would be interesting to know what she made of the ...”

“... Exchange Building. In 1993, one man, George Heron, had been acquitted of her murder; now another, David Boyd, was about to stand trial.In 1992, Sunderland’s shipyards had closed down, Monkwearmouth colliery was about to be mothballed and, though Liebherr cranes still tilted their long necks across the docks, and Nissan was mass-producing Primeras and Micras ...”

“... getting to the end of their shelf-life) and to the fulsome praise of the then highly influential Elizabeth Bowen. Soon after the book’s publication its author wrote modestly and accurately of her gift. I quote from Diaries: ‘I do not think I have any “creative” genius. Whatever I have, if I have anything, is the capacity to recognise things. If I ...”

“... In the introduction to their translation of the Italian Journey (1962), W.H. Auden and Elizabeth Mayer sought to explain and excuse British ignorance of, and indifference to, Goethe by drawing attention to the undeniable fact that his work is particularly resistant to translation into English. This is to be expected in the case of Goethe’s lyric ...”

“... the Booker should favour. Ah, that would explain the exclusion of Coetzee’s novel of ideas, Elizabeth Costello – not up to the Hornby level. To be fair to him, the former Merton Professor is not slumming; he’s bought the place and moved right in. But prize-winners should not be blamed for prizes, any more than gnats for standing water, and ...”

“... According to the magus John Dee, whose antiquarian researches captured the attention of the queen, Elizabeth had ‘title royal to all the coasts and islands beginning at or about Terra Florida, and so alongst, or near unto Atlantis [America], going northerly, and then to all the most northern islands great and small, and so compassing about ...”

“... the sacred encounters of his imagination that a poet’s impulse to write a poem arises.’ The Elizabeth Bishop who likened knowledge to water, ‘dark, salt, clear, moving, utterly free’, would probably have agreed. So the introduction is an obvious disaster; the 55 poets, you feel, blush for it. Mostly they contradict it. The style of interesting poets ...”