“... upon Harold Jenkins’s magisterial Arden and Philip Edwards’s serious Cambridge version.1 It may well be asked by non-Shakespearians and non-publishers whether all this editorial activity is needed, and by whom, and the Oxford team anticipates the question by asserting the boldness as well as the unparalleled scope of its enterprise. It is worth asking ...”

“... to Melchior’s father from his agents in Paris, Berlin, London and Prague, each of whom, one may assume, had been given certain guidelines on what to buy, since, for example, the London agent appears to have bought mostly finely-illustrated ornithological texts; the Paris agent, new books from the private presses; the Berlin agent, bound collections of ...”

“... Essays of Bertrand Russell in Russell, the journal of the Bertrand Russell Archives. The prophecy may come true, but even if I were to survive as long as Russell, I am unwilling to bet that I should be around to see it fulfilled. The prospectus appeared in Volume XII of Russell, the date of which was Winter 1973-4. Now, ten years later exactly, we have the ...”

“... Sindona were members of P2 and both contributed extensively to Gelli’s financial activities. In May 1981, P2 was exposed in a blaze of publicity which kept every newspaper and television station in Italy busy for months, brought down the Government, and ultimately led to the election of the first non-Christian Democrat prime minister since the war. The ...”

“... enlightened rule. It is certainly true that Gomulka sought a ‘national way’, and he may have intended the sort of pluralism that the French Communist Party used to speak of in the early 1970s, meaning tolerance for parties of the Left; and, as Ascherson argues, he did create conditions in which the Stalin era was less bloody and shorter than ...”

“... sake the choice of assumed name should be arbitrary and inscrutable. In some cases, there may be the good reason that the author has something important to lose if he’s recognised. Patrick Mann’s novels (Steal Big, Dog Day Afternoon) carry the front-cover information that ‘Patrick Mann is the pseudonym of a former US Army Intelligence agent who ...”

“... intuition and the desired answer is a matter of complex negotiation, in which some intuitions may have to be disregarded, it remains true that a satisfying conclusion is at peace with intuition, or, anyway, with the stronger or less deniable part of it. Nagel has been at the centre of Anglophone philosophical endeavour for twenty-five years because he ...”

“... historians which lies outside my competence. Another such issue is whether 18th-century England may properly be called, as in the title of Paul Langford’s recent book, ‘a polite and commercial people’: a title which draws from Thompson the observation that ‘historical conferences on 18th-century questions tend to be places where the bland lead the ...”

“... of precise and elusive implications. Uncertainty is a path, a destination, a need. Of course we may not like the thought, and many of us will prefer to see our detours as chosen directions, uncertainty as something to be shaken off rather than returned to. But truths can often be measured by the urgency of our desire to avoid them, and sometimes only by ...”

“... that brought Benito Mussolini to power 75 years ago, on 28 October 1922. What transpired, however, may be something more elusive than a simple or straightforward event, something far more difficult to capture or describe: a subtle compound of likenesses and illusions.The March on Rome, it can be plausibly argued, never actually took place. The notion of an ...”

“... minimal sense of verisimilitude,’ she complains, and then confesses, rather movingly: And we may be tempted to forget how impossibly difficult it is to create a free and lifelike character, or to feel that this particular effort is worth making ... How soon one discovers that, however much one is in the ordinary sense ‘interested in other ...”

“... the sea was as real to him as the sound of a skylark singing on a summer evening.In the middle of May, Shelley wrote to Byron that, ‘after the first shock’, Clairmont had ‘sustained her loss with more fortitude than I had dared to hope’. Shelley, too, was in better spirits, having taken possession of a sailing boat built for him at Genoa. ‘It cost ...”

“... while Henry Porter (whose Two Angry Women of Abingdon influenced The Merry Wives of Windsor) may have been still younger when he was killed in a duel by John Day, another playwright, in 1599. John Lyly, who gave up writing for 15 years to concentrate on his unsuccessful career in politics, made it to his early fifties, and John Marston lived to nearly ...”

“... to by a name that appears only once in his work, that he never refers to in his letters, and that may have been no more than a temporary legal expedient. No doubt there is little point in defying a usage so entrenched; on the other hand, did Lautréamont write the Poésies, signed ‘Isidore Ducasse’?Besides ‘Lautréamont’, another name has provoked ...”

“... Open Frank O’Hara’s Collected Poems at random, somewhere in the middle, and you may get what looks like a Post-It note to a friend, or versified notes on a Jackson Pollock painting, a James Dean movie or ‘the music of Adolphe Deutsch’. You may also get one of many enticing, informal, secretly-complex poems that sound like nobody else ever has: How can you start hating me when I’m so comfortable in your raincoat the apples kept bumping off the old gnarled banged-up biddy-assed tree and I kept ducking and hugging and bobbing as if you were a tub of water on Hallowe’en it was fun but you threw yourself into reverse like a tractor hugging the ground in spring that was nice too more rain more raincoat                                  (‘Adventures In Living’) Who was O’Hara, and how did he learn to write like that? Born in 1926, he grew up in small towns in Massachusetts, studied piano seriously throughout high school and served in the Navy at the close of World War II ...”