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“... burst of critical energy released by these reorientations in turn converged with the quest for a fuller reckoning with the Nazi past. In the process, adherence to the Fischer thesis became a marker of probity and moral rectitude. ‘The Fischer controversy of the 1960s was always more than just an academic dispute about scraps of paper in the ...”

“... at the expense of others.’ In general, this Collected Poems serves its editor’s wish: we see a fuller Coleridge. The man saluted by the devoted Lamb as ‘Poet, Metaphysician, Bard!’ appears here as something more everyday, more humane: as a literary type, as a writer, who worked steadily and sometimes comically or coarsely despite all his formidable ...”

“... of an allusive dedication (but to whom?) or an introductory quotation from my favourite poem by John Donne, rehearsing the terms of restrained self-promotion in which to couch the perfect blurb. I was relieved to find that reflections of this nature still achieved a satisfactory standard of consecutive coherence as far as they went, but depressed to ...”

“... of his uncle being a farm-labourer, or the blighted life of the intelligent, radical cobbler John Antell who married into the family. Instead, Hardy exaggerates the scale of the Rockhampton cottage where he was born, his father’s status in the social scale (he attributes his comparative lack of success in the building business to his being by nature ...”

“... from the 1880s on – call ‘the Bengali heart’. This is true; and yet, to get a fuller sense of the impact nature had on Tagore, and the impact it has on us through his writing, we have to take into account its long-lasting and intriguing influence on his intellectual development. In fact, Tagore’s natural world, in the songs and ...”

“... unusually illuminating coffee-table book by the film critic Antoine de Baecque – we have a much fuller picture not only of Melville’s war, but of the ways it shaped his films. As de Baecque writes: ‘Melville would remain a man the war had fashioned, faithful to a vanished time.’ While the sets of his films were expressionistic confections, not ...”

“... often depicted on pots. But until the 1952 decipherment of Linear B by Michael Ventris and John Chadwick, the ruling orthodoxy was that a hypothesised ‘Minoan’ was the (un-Greek) language of the palace culture of Crete and the Mycenaean settlements, so that the origins of the Iliad must come after that, not earlier than the start of the first ...”

“... She is also a marvellous, canny writer. But in its new and expanded version (she has added a fuller account of Cather’s critical reception in the 1920s and 1930s and a concluding reflection on her ‘tragic sense of life’) her essay must also disquiet even the most jaded anti-academic. Were all the critical manoeuvres executed by Cather scholars over ...”

“... thinkers in the context of German intellectual and political history.’ There then follows a fuller account of what he said or wrote on each occasion and a review of how these interventions were received. Stern’s archives must be enormous. Even when he admits he knows little about a subject he usually gets good reviews and lets readers in on ...”

“... Proms. Think Morning Service at the village church, carols from King’s College Cambridge, Elton John singing to the nation from Westminster Abbey. Think popular music in general and, when Plato brings in a parallel from the visual arts, forget the Tate Gallery and recall the advertisements that surround us everywhere. Above all, think about the way all this ...”

“... example, author, with her husband, of My Boy Jack? The Search for Kipling’s Only Son (1998). (John Kipling died in his first half-hour in action – at the age of 18 – at Loos in 1915. Though his stricken father carried on a 20-year search for his grave, his remains were not found until 1992.) When not writing, the Holts run a sprightly operation known ...”

“... of his life between the wars. In 1929 he was floating a municipal bond in Milan, at the behest of John McCloy, when he fell in love with the newly-wed wife of one of his Italian employees. There was no divorce under Mussolini, and a child was born two years later. Attempts to get the marriage annulled were resisted by the husband and father, and refused by ...”

“... was the rustle of the Holy Ghost, hers an oracular hooga-booga. The objections that Howe, Rahv, John Simon, the art critic Hilton Kramer and other keepers of the scrolls lodged against her were as much about the 1960s as they were about her, for no one in the Family (as Norman Podhoretz, a former Partisan Review-er, dubbed them) personified the 1960s more ...”

“... of mind’. It was, rather, a form and a style expansive and flexible enough to permit a fuller realisation of that state of mind. Without question he wrote nearly all his most accomplished work during their years together, 1915-33. But in much of the poetry written before that, between 1910 and 1914, the Waste Land ethos is so manifestly in evidence ...”

“... Intellectuals and the Masses (1992), his influential study of elitism in 20th-century literature, John Carey writes about the ‘duplicity’ of Joyce’s Ulysses, a novel supposedly about love for the common man, but written in such a forbidding way that the common man is unlikely to read it. Well, The Lord of the Rings is the opposite. It is a work written ...”