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“... page and note that the translator is the poet himself. Given some of the ingenious and pleasing English rhymes (‘warty’ with ‘forty’) and near-rhymes (‘transparence’ with ‘larynx’), we should be churlish to begrudge all applause. The poem as a whole transmits an air of flamboyance that is hard to resist, even when the claims the poet appears ...”

“... grand head-on, Neoclassical façades for simple reproduction (see, for example, the magnificent Richard Pare collection, Photography and Architecture 1839-1939)? Photography would then be co-operating in the actual construction of the newer buildings, angling into dimensions of built space that our ordinary human bodies have little daily commerce ...”

“... is Tadeusz Konwicki. In all, six books by Konwicki (born in Wilno in 1926) have appeared in English. I propose to leave the first two out of discussion: The Anthropos-Spectre-Beast, ‘a fantasy for young readers’ that is as hard-edged and adult as everything else of Konwicki’s; and A Dreambook of Our Time, once chosen by Philip Roth for his Penguin ...”

“... and the household entered a state of ‘severe Depression-shock’. Linda had a master’s in English from Cornell, and thought herself better than the small-minded Shillington middle class. She was a frustrated writer. ‘My mother,’ Updike wrote in a late poem, ‘knew non-publication’s shame.’ It was a shame that hardly troubled him after the age ...”

“... or rather, Leland Stanford Junior University, as it is still officially called. As the historian Richard White puts it in his lively account of the institution’s origins, ‘without the dead child – Leland Stanford Junior – the Stanford campus would be just another patch in the suburbs sweeping south from San Francisco.’Leland Stanford Jr, born in ...”

“... Thomas More, the scrupulous martyr, is the complete English saint. But no man can be a saint in God’s eyes, and no man should be one in ours; and certainly not Thomas More. He is seen as a Catholic martyr because he died opposing Henry VIII’s divorce from Catherine of Aragon and the King’s robbery from the Pope of the leadership of the English Church ...”

“... generations of excellent buggers performing on radio, stage and television, warming the cockles of English hearts and occasionally laying down their trousers in pursuit of their genius. Poofterism has a very grand tradition in England, and though the subject failed to catch the attention of George Orwell, it might have been a nice thing if it had, given its ...”

“... In the Preface to his new book Richard Wollheim tells how he ‘evolved a way of looking at paintings which was massively time-consuming and deeply rewarding’. He looked at them for a very long time – longer than us – and then they told him what they were all about. I came to recognise that it often took the first hour or so in front of a painting for stray associations or motivated misperceptions to settle down, and it was only then, with the same amount of time or more to spend looking at it, that the picture could be relied upon to disclose itself as it was ...”

“... was drawn on by Peter Martyr for his bestselling De orbe novo, which in turn was translated into English by Richard Eden, whose version formed one of the many texts metabolised in that alembic of metamorphic and ethnographic literatures, The Tempest. In a surprise move (the book seems deliberately to cultivate the ...”

“... letters supposedly showing Parnell’s complicity in the Phoenix Park murders had been forged by Richard Pigott. The Commission Report did seem to support the Tory case that Irish agrarian violence had been in part because of, and not in spite of, the Land League’s advocacy of non-violent action. But after the Pigott debacle who was ready to make capital ...”

“... will finance a complete edition of the correspondence of the best letter-writer among all English statesmen.’ The editors are kind enough to quote this in their Introduction. The world of historical scholarship must be immensely grateful to Queen’s University for housing and to the Canada Council for funding the Disraeli Project. Let us hope that ...”

“... Between​ the wars, the journalist Richard Usborne recalled in 1953, there was a feeling that John Buchan was good for you. ‘If not exactly the author set for homework, Buchan was certainly strongly recommended to the schoolboy by parent, uncle, guardian, pastor and master,’ he wrote in Clubland Heroes, a study of the thrillers he had enjoyed as a child ...”

“... Richard Payne Knight was an important English intellectual of the era of the French Revolution. He flourished from the 1770s until his death, perhaps by suicide, in 1824. Most of that time he wielded great influence in the art world, as a leading collector, connoisseur and aesthetician, but as the theorist of potent subjects like myth and symbol he mattered almost as much to the poets ...”

“... McGrail’s contribution on ships. This chapter supersedes all other discussions of the subject in English, and Ray Page, on letters runic and poetic, offers a remarkable example of how an expert can demonstrate the general interest of a very technical topic without sacrifice of scholarly integrity. The Northern World hardly succeeds in its professed ...”

“... for the person in Irish America whose great-grandparents were Irish, Italian, Armenian, German, English, Scottish and French. It’s clear that across the country, people single out their Irish forebears, but Byron concludes that, in most cases, people’s descriptions of their ethnic origins are idiosyncratic and changeable – ‘like a reversible T-shirt ...”