“... glass. ‘Such people are demented,’ he says, ‘and I would surely be losing my own mind if I took them as a model or exemplum that might be applied to me.’ It is a transparent literary set-up. You obviously don’t have to be sane in order to be firmly convinced of your sanity, and you would have to be really far gone to deny absolutely that you might ...”

“... professional. In the mid-17th century, the Royal Society established a committee including Dryden, John Evelyn and Edmund Waller, ‘to improve the English tongue’. Nothing much came of this. In 1658, Milton’s nephew Edward Philips had published a New World of English Words which reached its seventh edition by 1720. Swift busied himself with the state of ...”

“... Britain without reference to the superb and painful full-length history of it that the late John Vyvyan published in 1969, In Pity and in Anger. (His notes refer, however, to the sequel, though that carries him beyond his chosen period.) It is flabbergasting that he should do so without mentioning that, when the University of Oxford built a vivisection ...”

“... Choir. By 1914 she was working as an assistant at the Ashmolean Museum. During the war Matheson took up clerical posts with the Mayor of London’s emergency fund and the Third General Hospital, then the War Office and, probably on the recommendation of her Oxford tutors, the Security Intelligence Bureau. She worked in espionage in London and later in ...”

“... and Robert made up to each other I made fun of it, and that when Myrtle made up tome I solemnly took it all in. You are quite right.’ With a little practice, of course, one comes to respond to this respectful consideration. The cosseted reader starts to enjoy, not only the intimate little details that belong specially to the period – like the ...”

“... better things, and for some reason not quite bringing it off in this fine but flawed collection. John Harrison keeps well within his limits in The Ice Monkey, and Other Stories. Written over the period from 1975 to 1982, these seven stories have a sharpness of detail and a sureness of overall control that is wholly admirable. At the same time, Harrison does ...”

“... the high hopes initially entertained were proved vain. The upper classes preferred Mayfair; it took half a century to build and let the houses in Gordon Square; the siting of Euston Station close by did untold damage as heavy traffic invaded the hitherto sequestered streets; and ‘creeping decline’ proved irresistible, as houses were converted into ...”

“... at some length about the Original Spelling edition, partly because it represented what I took to be an unexplained change of editorial policy (there are arguments against such an edition, some of which the senior editor had quite recently endorsed); and partly because justification for some of its readings – ‘fake antiques’, as they were ...”

“... type of lordly self-belief, nor with the obsessive thirst for fame that motivated a poet like John Berryman. His literary career is often compared pityingly with their astute professionalism, as if, authentic poète maudit though he was, he never quite got the marketing right. Certainly he never managed to create out of his sufferings the suspense of a ...”

“... it comes from the heart of the political élite itself. The Commission was instigated by the late John Smith and conducted its work under the auspices and with the assistance of the Institute of Public Policy Research. The Institute also published the important working papers which preceded the Report. The Commission was carefully not tied to the Labour ...”

“... Romanian, Bulgarian, Hungarian and Russian peasants. Even among ourselves the Australian poet John Manifold, also an ex-service linguist and ballad collector, would, like Hamish, return to his homeland and there collect and contribute to a tradition (his work was performed and published as Bandicoot Ballads). Our optimism was immense. After all, we ...”

“... with an ANC-ruled South Africa, back within the Commonwealth. If the book has a hero it is Sir John Maud, the British high commissioner who advised in 1960 that since a black government must come to power one day, Britain must ‘keep faith’ with the black majority, while at the same time not antagonising the National Party government to no good ...”

“... a fictional symposium that ran in the paper between 1822 and 1835. The author of the Noctes was John Wilson, who constructed dialogues between his own alter ego (‘Christopher North’) and that of Hogg (‘the Shepherd’). The Shepherd gets the best lines – better, some have suggested, than anything Hogg ever wrote – but he is also made to look a ...”

“... the museum after its redesign by the Japanese architect Yoshio Taniguchi. In the New Yorker John Updike likened its presence to ‘an invisible cathedral’, but it is closer to an abstract palace. The main access is now nearer Sixth than Fifth Avenue, and you enter from either 53rd or 54th Street into a lobby, paced with white columns, that cuts all ...”

“... Minds have been made up about John Updike. A typical review will begin by grudgingly acknowledging the brilliance of his ‘style’ – as if Updike’s style were a set of dainty curlicues, and not his manner of thought – before complaining about his misogyny, his conservatism, his theological bad faith, the gratuitousness of his language ...”