“... doleful about the poems’ retrieval of a happier past for slippered contemplation. In one of the best poems in the book, ‘1996’, it is the bad smell and its painful associations that stay in the memory rather than the peach tree image with which Dunn seeks to expunge them: The Expelair in the lavatory – Relentless thing – is a better orator Than I ...”

“... at Oxford. The only begetter of the study of literary theory at Oxford, he became the subject’s best-known teacher there, the leading authority in the field in Britain, and one of its most acclaimed proponents in the world beyond. Appropriately, the major function of literary theory on both sides of the Atlantic was to open a gate and sponsor an ...”

“... inner murk – his buried life.’ This chapter needs a far more interrogative context, such as Geoffrey Hartman provides in The Fateful Question of Culture (1997). Raine keeps such a context distant by concentrating on the English Eliot. We hear a lot of Arnold and Kipling, something of Browning and Clough, Shakespeare and Milton, less of Pater, but ...”

“... audience though few, no irony intended. I know these beasts and trust their judgment. Mozart is best. When I play his concerti, they sway and maunder up the meadow to listen. Hindemith always sends them back to the river, where they skulk among the reeds. It’s an anxious moment, since the piece is untypical Holloway in its spare, inventive line, but they ...”

“... society of Mrs Grundyism – were they themselves being hypocritical, or just blind to their own best interests? Could they not see that the whole depth and suggestion of their art depended upon ‘appearances thoughtfully preserved’ and ‘denials successfully sustained’? ‘A truly refined mind,’ says Mrs General in Dickens’s Little Dorrit, ‘will ...”

“... text that has meaning for the anthropologist was written down, and naturally not in the forms best suited for cultural analysis. Different kinds of evidence must be elicited over and over again from the same documents, much as if an anthropologist studying a modern society were allowed to view his subjects only on certain days of their own choosing, and ...”

“... with moving illumination and with benign warning, in short a delight-house of a book. It is the best work at once of literary criticism and of literary history I’ve read for many and many a day.No less agile at dancing than at pouncing, the disciplined movement of mind here is never shifty and always nifty.But before praising it to the skies (and then ...”

“... of a very able team’ in South Africa, who became an investment banker and remained easily the best of the set; Geoffrey Dawson, editor of the Times for 26 years, who almost worshipped Neville Chamberlain; Lionel Curtis, like Brand and Dawson, a fellow of All Souls, but unlike them often a grinding bore, who pursued ...”

“... cover and set off in search of a place where I might try again. Mr Baker’s anthology was on the best-seller list by the summer, when I took it down to Dorset and found the place where it would really come to life. Driving up from West Lulworth, I left behind the yellow fields of EEC oil seed rape and travelled up onto the rougher, more English ground of ...”

“... from the tacit assumption that Deadeye Dick is not a masterpiece, whether or not it becomes a best-seller, we can concentrate our minds on what it is that makes Vonnegut’s style of storytelling so distinctively beguiling. Vonnegut himself is there to tell us, in his author’s preface, what we can expect as a dividend from our reading: some of his ...”

“... politics, and (cushioned by his investments and his wife’s independent income) enjoyed the best of the local cultural life. Taylor kept trying, however, to return to Oxford, and in 1938 succeeded, beginning an association with Magdalen that would last for almost four decades. The early Oxford years were happy and productive: Taylor wrote several ...”

“... room; people travel through time; they consort with the embodied presences of Plato’s Ideas. The best of his poetry (the part of his work he was proudest of and believed to be the most original) presents the Arthurian myth of the Holy Grail refracted through a series of dense lyric pieces, as in: This is the way of the world in the day of that ...”

“... have lived before us, and those who are yet to be born.’ This election was perhaps Britain’s best chance of taming the turbo-capitalist Thatcherite beast. We were initially cheered by the result, but will the left come to regret the defeat of the statist vision Timothy was attempting to impose on a reluctant – but cowed and largely unconsulted ...”

“... was the magical cut in his career. It isn’t simply that some of his films are among the best or most enduring ever made. They show the mysterious rendering of an admirable yet unreliable paragon, who seems to be watching us. His reticent triumph and edgy uncertainty seemed elemental, and he was more absorbing than Famous Actors like Olivier, Brando ...”

“... assumption that, whenever a town fell into Allied hands, it was his right to commandeer its best hotel. Since he worked very much in concert with his two principal competitors – Alexander Clifford of the Daily Mail and Christopher Buckley of the Daily Telegraph – this was something they normally achieved, although at times they went one better by ...”