“... only his name but his age as well. Larkin at Sixty can’t therefore do anything but make a reader hope for just that: a Portrait of the Artist. There are, it is true, a handful of pleasantly occasional photographs, and what seems in reproduction a surprisingly bad drawing of the poet, but the text may foil anyone whose ‘Larkin’ is the author of the three ...”

“... to swim municipally? Tomorrow we leave as the house is now sold, putting me in mind of Francis Hope’s poem about the holidays we had in rented villas back in the 1970s: Goodbye to the Villa Piranha Prepare the journey North, Smothering feet in unfamiliar socks. Sweeping the bathroom free of sand, collecting Small change of little worth. Make one last ...”

“... and I believe it to be, in the end, false. The response of the young was less critical. Christopher lsherwood went as an undergraduate to Richards’s lectures and hailed him as ‘the prophet we have been waiting for ... To us, he was infinitely more than a brilliantly new literary critic; he was our guide, our evangelist, who revealed to us, in a ...”

“... was.’ Such apocalyptic language attached itself to Henry in 1610-12, not least in the hope expressed to the Prince in 1611 by Samson Lennard, who had fought with Sidney at Zutphen, that he might ‘live to march over the Alps, and to trail a pike before the walls of Rome, under your highness’ standard’. In the same way, Greville’s belief ...”

“... in the critical population has produced. So it seems, at any rate, to my generation. Recently Christopher Norris has been meditating, with his usual tact, the resemblances and differences between the Empson of The Structure of Complex Words and the Paul de Man of Allegories of Reading – a sign, perhaps, that the most neglected (and most theoretical) of ...”

“... solemn music as to approach the clerihew, something about which Hill makes a knowing joke: ‘Sir Christopher Wren, in or around the year seventeen ten, went to dine with some men, memorially, with a view to re-edifying the clerihew.’ Wren went to dine with some men in a clerihew by E.C. Bentley, the inventor of the form: ‘He said, “if anyone calls/Say ...”

“... which Auden himself posed in his delightful short poem ‘Orpheus’: ‘What does the song hope for?’ ‘To be bewildered and happy/Or most of all the knowledge of life?’ Auden’s own unsatisfactory resolution of a similar crux, his famous revision of ‘or’ to ‘and’ in the line ‘We must love one another or die,’ may suggest a quick ...”

“... only way to make sense of Prince, but to try and make sense of him without it is a truly forlorn hope. Yet, to my knowledge, the only critic who ever tackled the subject head on is the writer Carol Cooper, an African American woman who had also worked in the music industry. In an astute piece for the Face in June 1983 (it includes a wholly imaginary Q&A with ...”

“... a large enough subject. Or perhaps it is too abstract a subject. The middle stanza blazes, and we hope that the poem will go on to make something of it. But it does not. The final stanza resumes the deep quibbling of the first; the material is exchanged for the immaterial. If a poetic connection of sorts with Mandelstam has been made (and apologised for), a ...”

“... justice, and partly because a generation bereft of political memory has cynically abandoned all hope for the ‘centre’. Like most US feminism, post-colonialism is a way of being politically radical without necessarily being anti-capitalist, and so is a peculiarly hospitable form of leftism for a ‘post-political’ world. Gayatri Spivak, by ...”

“... or shame, for instance, that made Eric Blair rechristen himself at the start of his career? As Christopher Hollis tells us: ‘The reasons he gave for changing his name are oddly unconvincing. He complained that Blair was a Scots name and that he disliked Scotland because of its association with the deer forests about which his rich schoolfellows used to ...”

“... secret temples of Moloch. The experiments, proofs and improvements espoused by such scientists as Christopher Wren, Dyer’s patron in the building trade, Dyer pisses on. The homicides and post-mortems in the book permit the new religion of science to exercise its power: but they also occasion the necrophile broodings which exude from Dyer. Much of this ...”

“... as a negative quota allocation, strictly minority, coming out of Africa, via Port au Prince, to Christopher Street. The WHO goes to Kikwit without any claims to a mercy mission; there’s no humiliation for local health personnel. This is not Ethiopia 1974 or 1984-5; there’s no famine, no genocide, no celebrities, no good works to be done: the issue is ...”

“... that it was in part written by the up-and-coming Shakespeare. Other writers proposed include Christopher Marlowe, Thomas Kyd and, most recently, Thomas Watson. According to a contemporary account of his death in 1593, Marlowe himself was knifed while playing backgammon. I have sometimes wondered if this detail, not found in the coroner’s report, was an ...”

“... statesmen, like others, did not know what they were doing.’ Something similar is argued by Christopher Clark in The Sleepwalkers, a book whose title says it all. I don’t think this is just an academic spat, a Historikerstreit, with little application to modern political debate. On the contrary, I think it has had a damaging knock-on effect on our ...”