“... eight years of Leavis’s life, to which some early pieces from Scrutiny are added (the attack on Joyce is of special interest), the essays contain few surprises. Dismissive judgments and complex evaluations mingle. Milton is quietly denied any influence on early Blake in favour of ‘the traditional popular culture and Shakespeare’. Hardy makes ‘a style ...”

“... from the heart. Not that I believe her: she learned much white magic, that included. Much of James Simmons’s From the Irish is accomplished doggerel: it seems to ask to be set to music for The Dubliners or The Wolfe Tones and sung in a pub in Howth. His persona is that of the honest Ulsterman, ‘The Poet’s Breastplate’ something to be beaten in ...”

“... 1936, a few days after the German invasion of the Rhineland, Nancy Astor threw a party at 4 St James’s Square. As well as being the first woman MP (elected in 1919), Astor was a legendary hostess. To this particular dinner party she invited various League of Nations delegates, the American and Russian ambassadors, an assortment of English friends and ...”

“... successful’, adding that ‘there is no English prose at present, except Mr Joyce’s, which in subtlety and resource can be compared with it.’ While Woolf was still working on To the Lighthouse, the Hogarth Press republished this assessment along with Muir’s pieces on ...”

“... expected to provide some co-ordinates. Yet even among modern masters there is little consistency. James died in his early seventies, Musil in his early sixties: Leon Edel and Karl Corino awarded them each two thousand pages. Kafka, who barely reached the age of forty, yielded only five hundred fewer from Reiner Stach. Proust, expiring at 51, got just under a ...”

“... in Proust. Sex? A Dance gives full measure to the place of desire in human life. Powell credited James with ‘forcing, almost single-handed, the English novel into the status of a work of art’, but remarked that there he fell short; even The Golden Bowl was limited by a ‘chronically inadequate understanding of sexual passion as an element in human ...”

“... her mouth, or break from her. The blackmail story, which Fullerton related pathetically to Henry James as well as to Edith Wharton, his new mistress (or one of them), might, one thinks, have been all an interesting fiction to put a polite face on Fullerton’s lack of interest in committing himself elsewhere. Sherlock Holmes, following Arsène Lupin, would ...”

“... There is some evidence to suggest he contributed more than an initial to the ‘M’ figure in the James Bond books: hence Masters’s title. ‘M’, true enough, was the office sobriquet of Maxwell Knight, though not his only extra appellation. His work made it necessary for him to have a pseudonym or two at his disposal, and so we find ‘Captain ...”

“... generation of writers is in William Cooper’s debt, just as the previous generation was in James Joyce’s debt’. But this comparison, justified though it may be, is bound to make the deliberately small-scale character of Cooper’s achievement all the more evident. Scenes from Metropolitan Life is largely about the withering of worldly ...”

“... in McTaggart or Bradley. He broke loose from Hegelianism with the help first of William James and then of Russell, Moore and Alexander. But unlike Russell, Anderson did not emerge from his Hegelianism determined to deny whatever Hegel had asserted and to assert whatever Hegel had denied. He continued to respect Hegel – who was himself an ...”

“... a Middle Eastern work by assimilating it to a European double: the Algerian Conrad, the Egyptian Joyce, the Lebanese Austen etc. Kilito can be fierce when he examines the glib equivalences and assumptions readers – and translators – make when they try to understand one language and culture through the lens of another. In his own work, both critical ...”

“... his first novel, High Priest of California, an existential tale of California sleaze, about a Joyce-quoting used car salesman trying to bed a married woman. He finally left active duty in 1956. He was 37. He worked as a boxer, actor, horse trainer and radio announcer. He lived in France and studied painting, wrote reviews for the Miami Herald, and was an ...”

“... publisher of Laforgue, editor and organiser of Rimbaud’s Les Illuminations; publisher of Joyce and translator of Northanger Abbey. He was invisible partly because he was a facilitator rather than a creator, but also because of his manner, which was elliptical, ironic, taciturn. Some found him caustic and rather frightening; though his actions were ...”

“... in the trenches during the First World War are familiar, but Rose has found a Glasgow woodcarver, James Murray, who responded to the horrors around him by carrying a different volume of poetry in his kitbag – Goethe, in the original. Reading could be uncontrollable in other ways. Female readers read books for boys without adopting ...”

“... of the Twenties, Thirties and Forties. There are virtuoso pages like 71, where Henry James and Edmund Gosse bicycle through the text (‘Those were bicycle times ... The Time Machine with its saddle was itself a transfigured bicycle. Wells’s third novel The Wheels of Chance (1896), had been all about bicyclists’). The book offers a cornucopia ...”