“... adverse criticism, but by and large his view of his brother’s work is clouded with stars, if I may put it that way. And anyway, his notion of what poetry is chimes discordantly with mine. ‘Technique is important in poetry only so that it may reveal the supernatural.’ Or, more unevasively still: ‘As Patrick read his ...”

“... a canter to the battlefield that is divisiveness and in the ensuing contest of wills the rider may fall off. One cavalry unit has, for the moment, ceased to exist. It ought to follow, but apparently does not, that when a right-wing government contrives to heighten social divisions rather than to obscure them, its adversaries should be hugely entertained ...”

“... condemned to live in the shadow of apocalypse, without certainties or hope of moral progress, may explain why, from her first book to her last, all Tuchman’s work has dealt with wars: their origins, their consequences and, above all, what it was like to fight in them. At a time when professional historians were beginning to turn their backs on ...”

“... I do not know the answer. Nuclear weapons are a deterrent primarily against nuclear attack. They may not deter aggression by ‘conventional’ (i.e. non-nuclear) forces, because in the event of, say, the Soviet Army invading Western Europe, it is not credible that the United States would pull the nuclear trigger, inviting a nuclear holocaust. Yet even here ...”

“... then threatened not to pay; and the Commission started legal proceedings against them. They may end up in the dock at the European Court. Future historians of Europe may see the whole story as a constitutional struggle, like royal feuds with the House of Commons in Britain, or federal versus states’ rights in the ...”

“... you ask yourself why he did not shoot himself, or rather begin to wonder, nervously, whether he may not try to. The laments about a writer’s life, which are the dominating theme of his letters, are quite agonising. To Cunninghame Graham he writes, 16 February 1898: ‘Cher ami, I did not write because I was beastly seedy – nerve trouble – a taste of ...”

“... Readers of the old Eagle may remember that educative comic’s colourful centre-spread, where every week the latest triumphs of British technology (this was the new Elizabethan age) would be dissected for the enlightenment of British boyhood (girls read the Girl). The cutaway drawing, the arrow and the numbered part explained the workings of the jet engine or the diesel locomotive, or how Hunt’s expedition scaled Everest with oxygen masks and Kendal mint cake ...”

“... but about Jarrell’s one cannot be so sure. Of this query he was himself acutely aware, and it may have contributed to his mysterious death – accident or suicide – struck by a car when walking on a main road. The tone and import of his letters are as bland as apple pie, and their reader has no sense of the tensions and traumas that led him to mental ...”

“... for claiming that what I do is relevantly different from what Conan Doyle did falls away, why may we not suppose that Conan Doyle’s pretended references are real references too? The answer ‘Because there was no already existing fictional character for him to be referring to’ (cf. page 71) would apply at best to the first sentence, or perhaps the ...”

“... The present commentator refuses to play the game. He recognises Tippett’s genius, even though he may not sufficiently understand it. But he also recognises confusion and vagueness for what they are – an inadequacy. Good or bad, for better or worse, this review isn’t worth your attention unless you accept that there is no substitute for, no viable ...”

“... the contrary, solitude was always attractive, and his mysterious journey to consult the Army in May 1968, during the crisis, was possibly a means of recovering a precious solitude). But he was not seeking isolation. With De Gaulle we are not, apparently, dealing with a man who is planning his accession to power, in the sense that there are politicians who ...”

“... hypocrisy and frantic status-seeking gleefully recorded by Professor Fussell and his precursors may make it appear. For it rests on an underlying assumption that Americans treat each other as if they were all, whatever the other differences between them, of common social origin. None of them seriously believes that they are, any more than they believe that ...”

“... two covers will be counterbalanced by their price; and libraries, in this age of austerity, may think twice before buying duplicates of material they already possess. The Road to Middle-Earth, by T.A. Shippey, sets out to explore Tolkien’s imaginative writing in relation to the texts he studied and to the scholarship he published. Shippey thereby ...”

“... art, at any rate some great art, is amoral, unleashing energies which do not stop short of, which may even seek out, gratuitous ferocities. I fear that when I with too much aplomb urged him to essay ‘the deeper reaches’, I had myself not taken account of the sharks and barracuda which swim in those depths. For I too, like Dennis Enright though a few years ...”

“... practically every US critic who is actually qualified to pass expert judgment on its contents. One may simple-mindedly attribute these contrasting responses to FBTOH to the disrepute into which all architecture seems to have fallen in the popular media, so that any book knocking modern architecture is guaranteed a welcome from everybody but modern architects ...”