“... rich material would inevitably make its way into his fiction. But it wasn’t until 2009 that Jean-Christopher Cloutier unexpectedly came across another novel that had been buried in the archives. Amiable with Big Teeth was written in 1941 but has only now been published for the first time, with an introduction by Cloutier and Brent Hayes Edwards.* It was the ...”

“... are, not what you pretend to be. You, Wystan, will find him very soon, within three months. You, Christopher, will have to wait much longer for yours ... At present he is only four years old.If looking for Mr Right was what it was, this celebrated voyage that put paid to a decade, it was lucky that Auden’s quest so soon found its object. Otherwise the ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... the issue of genre with questions of biography. Given the fates that overtook his colleagues Christopher Marlowe and Thomas Kyd in 1593 and 1594 – the one stabbed to death at 29, the other eventually dying after an extensive and painful interrogation – you could argue that Shakespeare might have felt that he had been living on borrowed time since the ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... Dirks does a first-rate job of summarising the debate between English historians of India, such as Christopher Bayly and David Washbrook, who downplay the corrupting nature of empire by assigning a good deal of the blame to Indian ‘agents and accomplices’, and a substantial number of post-colonial Indian and non-Indian historians who hold the Empire ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... as the vast clouds of passenger pigeons that once darkened the skies of America; one can only hope some institution of the future will be able to preserve a relic or two in honour of it, as the Smithsonian now preserves the stuffed remains of Martha. Should the Sterne defence seem unconvincing, however, the modern poet can always fall back on the notion ...”

“... wake of the great debate of the 1940s and 1950s that was dominated by R.H. Tawney, Lawrence Stone, Christopher Hill and Trevor-Roper himself. Its focus was the economic causes of the war. The conflicting hypotheses about the wealth and power of the aristocracy and gentry, about the waning of feudalism and the rise of the bourgeoisie, and about the relationship ...”

“... which Nixon railed and to which Kissinger reported. Today, the only way the Republicans can hope to win the coming presidential election is by promising not coexistence but perpetual conflict. It is hard to reconcile Dallek’s Kissinger – jealous, sycophantic, duplicitous and striving – with the one in Jeremi Suri’s Henry Kissinger and the ...”

“... eye to eye with the most notorious gangster in Chicago’.In America, he met the young journalist Hope Hale. Like all the women Cockburn was involved with, she was hotly radical and stubbornly self-reliant. They had to be: he moved with ease from job to job and woman to woman. According to Patrick Cockburn, Hale was fascinated ‘by Claud’s blend of ...”

“... entire output. It is gay, funny, macabre, tender and with an abundance of his sardonic wit, and I hope that my interpretation of these moods will in turn be transformed into a portrait of “Hitch”.’ This gesture was not enough to repair the rift that had opened up after their bitter disagreement over the Torn Curtain soundtrack. But it does confirm that ...”