“... of, this one is casual, even perfunctory. Long before I reached the end of what is a very long short book, I was at a loss to know why it had been written. Discussing the reasons why Burke, who had supported the revolution in America, should have been so hostile to the revolution in France, even in its earliest and most innocent phase, Hitchens remarks ...”

“... minds to new kinds of non-traditional poetry, and it was confirmed with the appearance of Philip Henderson’s modern-spelling edition in 1931. This put him within reach of the general reader, and the general reader, eager for a change from the post-Romantic pieties of the Golden Treasury and newly trained to rejoice in the toughnesses of Donne and ...”

“... researched, gruesome detail and ‘period’ dialogue; love affairs across ethnic boundaries). Philip Hensher amusingly panned that book, The Thousand Autumns of Jacob de Zoet (2010), which was set on a Dutch trading post in Nagasaki Bay in 1799, as ‘an exotically situated romance of astounding vulgarity’. Hensher took issue with its ...”

“... alleged are correct. Fame, after all, has more chance of attaching itself to the long than the short-lived. A more interesting suggestion put forward here is that the Black Death had less impact on the old than on the young. Certainly its effect in causing a step-down of the population of Europe to a level where it remained for the next century and a half ...”

“... between his backside and the chair on which he was seated. Visual, suggestive, memorable – in short, a film sequence which plays. While he was gently edging the slowly-developing script of The Emerald Forest towards the starting-line (Goldcrest backed the project first, spent $2m and then dropped out, whereupon Embassy Pictures stepped in), Boorman was ...”

“... been happy, and whose literary ambitions have been trivialised. First, she insists, ‘Austen’s short life may have been lived in relative privacy, but her novels show her to be a citizen, and certainly a spectator, of a far wider world.’ Second, and more controversially, she argues that ‘the true subject of serious fiction is not “current ...”

“... Circle, resuming the story in the late 1990s.’ The Closed Circle is either going to be a very short book, or Patrick is going to have to pep up a bit. Coe’s fastenings and fixings are not often so ugly and obvious – so butt-hinged – but his plots are often of such a complexity as to require a preface, explanatory acknowledgment or appendix. The ...”

“... also goes broader and deeper. The Western tradition of historiography was created in a remarkably short time by two men. Herodotus invented the idea that a major work of history should be a work of art, the idea that history-writing should be analytical, not merely narrating but also searching for the causes of things, and the idea of weighing evidence and ...”

“... Big beautiful eyes, good bones, a serious nose, a large, modern mouth and a figure to die for. Short though. A pocket Venus, they called her, barely five feet tall. But, according to Tim Heald, her latest biographer, who has previously committed to paper the lives of Brian Johnston,2 Denis Compton,3 Barbara Cartland4 and Prince ...”

“... in the taxi from the airport the air was drier than in the capital, and it was warm enough for short sleeves. When I told my driver that I had travelled from England to see the mummies of the vanished Chinchorro people, he boasted that they were better known internationally than they were in Chile. This isn’t entirely accurate. Most of the Chileans I ...”

“... quality of each individual voice, including its timbre and its distinct registers’. He devoted a short chapter to a rapturous description of the quality of emotion in the singing of the castrato Velluti. In Feldman’s version of things, the castrato had no interest in being figuratively or really female, but rather was ‘decidedly male’. In a rather ...”

“... by an enigmatic figure, whom Panofsky identified as King Herod but Koerner, citing Lotte Brand Philip, sees as ‘the Jewish Messiah arrived as Antichrist’ already at the Nativity, noting that ‘Christians expected Antichrist to be temporally ubiquitous, circulating through world history.’ That a fiend often lurks behind a friend is a lesson Bosch ...”

“... One day a long while ago Philip Larkin dropped a remark in passing about the difficulties of his current private life. He made it in the form of a jokey generalisation about the impossibility of relations between men and women, and added that the women ought really to marry each other, but that would be wrong, wouldn’t it? I forgot the remark for over thirty years until I bumped into it as an observation by one of the characters in Kingsley Amis’s latest novel, Difficulties with girls ...”

“... by special studies of anonymous or bestselling authors now suitable for academic recovery, Philip Fisher’s Still the New World marks a return in some ways to an older and less suspicious idea of ‘classic American literature’. Fisher is a critic who has written extensively on realist prose and painting, and his new book is a commentary on ...”

“... lengthy biographies in English. Jung Chang and Jon Halliday’s is the longest, having overtaken Philip Short’s Mao (1999) and Li Zhisui’s The Private Life of Chairman Mao (1995). It represents an extraordinary research effort. The authors have been working on the project since at least 1986, to judge by the date of the earliest interview ...”