“... and name-dropping. Not surprisingly, Lowell was not amused. The same disapproval fills his ‘John Wain’s Letters to Five More Artists’. The target is not just the peculiarly discursive poetry Wain invented in Wildtrack and its sequel, but the poet himself, who is presented as lacking proportion in marshalling great past artists to his ...”

“... According to John Constable, the trouble with self-taught painters was that they had such bad teachers. Creative writing workshops notwithstanding, every novelist is self-taught. An enduring reminder of this is Cervantes’s relationship with his equivocal double masterpiece Don Quixote, and the most persuasive analyst of both book and author remains E ...”

“... No one is conscious of all past moments in their history. The idea is weirdly reminiscent of John Locke. In itself, that is fitting, for it was he who put the word ‘consciousness’ into serious circulation, partly as an alternative to Descartes’s ‘thinking’ (of the cogito). Locke wanted a definition of personal identity, and he found it in ...”

“... are not new. The Peloponnesian War was triggered by one in the fifth century BCE; the Ottomans took Constantinople in 1453 after closing the Bosphorus. But targeted sanctions as a tool of peacetime foreign policy are a more recent innovation. In the aftermath of the First World War, liberal internationalists such as President Woodrow Wilson promoted them ...”

“... of Utopian customs, once arrived at the island finely dressed in gold chains. The islanders took the visitors to be slaves, and assumed that their simply-dressed servants were the emissaries. This kind of inversion is the rocker switch of all moral satire; in Lucian’s Menippus, which More translated, the hero travels to Hades to find that death has ...”

“... but still dramatic falls have been taking place in other states of the former Soviet Union). John Lloyd intends no irony in his title, but his book covers a time when Russians have abandoned birth in a big way. A new Russia may be in the process of being born, but new Russians are not. Far more serious than the refusal to reproduce is the collapse in ...”

“... more detailed and more steadily critical. Like Bourne, he concentrates on the years before Castro took power. In a text of 542 pages, Fidel does not enter Havana until page 373, and the ‘maturity’ of 1964-1986 is covered in a mere 55 pages; prior to taking power, Castro had of course done much less for a biographer to be critical about. It is the best ...”

“... than metre. The stakes are raised (though the game remains essentially the same) in ‘SDI’ by John Levett, where the briskly-handled iambic pentameter stiffens a pleasant holiday conceit and gives it seriousness and point:Ten miles above the tits at St TropezA satellite’s remote, panoptic eyeIs tracking us and quietly waiting forThe gesture that could ...”

“... overdue attention. Lawrence’s enemies still deny his comedy, which was often self-deprecating. John Carey, who wants all writers to be nice (ideally, as decent as Arnold Bennett), wrote a book about the nastiness of various modern writers called The Intellectuals and the Masses. In it Lawrence is scolded for his ‘fascism’, his ecstasies of ...”

“... weak introduction to his attack on the present Pope. Of course it is true, as O’Brien says, that John Paul II is an authoritarian and an obscurantist. (It could almost be said that these qualities come with the territory.) It is likewise the case that the Vatican and the Muslim extremists made common cause at the world population conference in Cairo. Yet ...”

“... small yet reliable magazine Antichrist. This Ravelston – some composite of Sir Richard Rees and John Middleton Murry – was a hedonistic yet guilt-ridden dilettante, good in a pinch, and soft on poets, but too easily embarrassed by brute exigence. Saul Bellow – who has already shown a vulnerability to exigent poets in his wonderful Humboldt’s Gift ...”

“... it an indeterminacy of meaning which had transcendent, even theological implications. Richards took a grim view of modern civilisation, but considered, ironically enough, that a scientifically-based criticism and psychology could insulate us from the most degrading effects of a scientific-technological society; or, as he quaintly put it, from ‘the more ...”

“... Orage made him his assistant at the New Age. This led to his meeting Aldous Huxley, the Sitwells, John Middleton Murry, Katherine Mansfield, Ezra Pound and other writers including the young Slovene Janko Lavrin, with whom Edwin would later edit the European Quarterly. Willa became headmistress of a part-time vocational school offering classes to young female ...”

“... chancer whose great fortune was accumulated as much by the successful outcomes to the risks he took as by his hard work and lively intuition’ – was a man who could resist his ‘inherited background’; and who retired in 1898 at the age of 51 ‘stupendously rich’. (‘It would be idle to speculate on how much money he was worth.’) This, as ...”

“... get what you pay for. Each concept has acquired constitutional legitimacy in its time – for, as John Griffith famously observed, the constitution is what happens. So when you pick up The New British Constitution and ask what new constitution that might be, one answer is that the British constitution, because it is always changing, is always new. But the ...”