“... a discussion of Brecht’s novel A Penny for the Poor, was published in the Partisan Review for winter 1939. The previous number had contained an interview he did with Ignazio Silone, and he’d also published a few translations and pseudonymous stories. He had just turned 30, and saw the Brecht piece as an auspicious entry into literary reviewing, yet it ...”

“... and tales of goblins and fairies and witches, told to raise shivers of pleasurable fear on a dark winter night. By uncoupling itself from belief, the vision of myth/fairy tale can be angled more sharply towards other tasks. Voltaire showed the way: from his vantage point, Zeus turning into a bull, Nebuchadnezzar into a wild animal, and the Beast bridegrooms ...”

“... shut, the books become lost to me, in the fear that I have been lost to them.It is a frugal winter. The jumpers are on and the heating switched off so I turn the pages with cold hands, which is a kind of nostalgia in itself.The Bluest Eye, Morrison’s first novel, published in 1970, opens with a brief, antic mash-up of a child’s first reading ...”

“... connected with one of the four elements. The humours were like something beyond themselves: like winter, like delved earth, like the rotation of the stars in the heavens.What kind of person were you? Clues to your particular composition of humours were abundant. Did you tend to have pleasant dreams, of dancing or laughing or embracing beautiful women? Did ...”

“... Vendler to distort major figures helps her discriminate among lesser planets. Her inclusion of Robert Hayden, for example, is bold and welcome. Moreover, her promise to present writers ‘whole’ has more chance of being fulfilled with subsidiary figures. When Eliot judged anthologies less just to major than minor poets, he was, as often, lending his ...”

“... out of Cambridge, he led a life of more strenuous sloth than his father, foxhunting in the winter, playing cricket through the summer, and concentrating on golf in the spring and autumn, lodging mostly with hearty friends who, in his own view, satisfied the sturdy Thornycroft half of his nature while his sensitive ‘oriental’ half was nourished by ...”

“... food. Venereal disease reached epidemic proportions: a spot check in Berlin in the first post-war winter found that nearly a third of girls examined were sufferers. But Allied top brass did not stand austerely aloof. One general in US Army Intelligence took a former mistress of Dr Goebbels to New York for a ‘furlough’ in the Waldorf and Ritz ...”

“... himself, in shadow, stands watching her warily. ‘Day after day,’ Feaver writes, ‘through the winter she lay there, frigid under his scrutiny.’ While they were there, Anne Dunn reappeared. Though married to Michael Wishart, she remained, as Feaver writes, ‘susceptible’: ‘Of course then we took up again. Then I got pregnant and … had an ...”

“... vote. Three essays provide insights into the changing social basis of Conservative support. Robert Waller’s position as research director for the Harris opinion poll has given him access to the surveys undertaken for the Conservative Party over the last thirty years. Here, simultaneously, is evidence of who voted Conservative and of the perceptions ...”

“... is Pierre Berton in The Arctic Grail. Berton accepts the challenge with a boldness worthy of a Robert M’Clure or a James Clark Ross. Not only does he tell the story of the Franklin Expedition and the search for it, he tells the story of all Arctic exploration in the 19th century in three overlapping stages: the search for the Northwest Passage, the ...”

“... author, William Jackson, a prominent figure in Exeter musical life. In a letter of 3 October 1799 Robert Southey sent Coleridge the unusual story he had recently heard from Jackson. At the age of 16 Bampfylde had gone to see the composer in Exeter, and had astonished him with his remarkable powers of improvisation on the harpsichord. Even after taking ...”

“... be determined’, the dozens of large snakes deposited on Southern Californian beaches during the winter of 1995 ‘are not some Biblical curse visited on the region to punish the wicked and sybaritic’, Mike Davis responds that ‘native Californians might disagree.’ What is the difference between the Marxist urban social critic and the religious ...”

“... she came to write of Coleridge as in what he was writing about her beloved brother. When in the winter of 1803-04 he was an unasked guest at Dove Cottage he was, she says, ‘lame and sick, screamed out in the night, durst not sleep etc etc, continually wanting coffee, broth, or something or other’. She and Mary had to sit up to wake him from ...”

“... Kodak, Mathew Gloag’s, the Financial Times, the Sunday Times and Fiji Film. In his preface, Robert Smith, Chairman of the Domesday Committee, observes: Every Briton is something of an historian. Britons have to be or they are not a hundred per cent British ... This country has been and will continue to be governed through its institutions. Through the ...”

“... shift occurred and America emerged as the dominant world influence on the English language. Robert Burchfield, chief editor of the Oxford English Dictionary, recently pointed out in the opening segment of the engaging BBC/PBS series The Story of English, that the centre of gravity of American English has itself shifted in the last generation from the ...”