“... of ten essays originally published between 1975 and 1989 and a Prologue, itself alone worth the price of the volume, which dilates on the current state of affairs in literary criticism and theory. The essays span the period marked by the composition of such books as The Classic (1975), The Genesis of Secrecy (1979), The Art of Telling (1983), Forms of ...”

“... that a poet must be either in the canon or not in it – poets such as John Clare, Thomas Hood, Richard Corbett, Henry Carey, and pre-eminently Christina Rossetti. Paulin has some inspired choices from her, alive to her inspiration in such very different poems as ‘I caught a little ladybird’ and ‘The Iniquity of the Fathers upon the Children’. This ...”

“... Lyndon Johnson is alive. James Jones is alive. Jim Morrison and Robert Penn Warren are alive. Richard Nixon is dead; and a Soviet-bloc skier named Ivana Trump – someone overhears Sixties psychic Jeanne Dixon saying – will assign her name to a novel she does not write with the full and worldwide backing of one of America’s largest publishing ...”

“... has remained steadily loyal to jazz since the Thirties, and The Duke Ellington Reader is worth its price simply for Richard Boyer’s magnificent profile of the great man (‘The Hot Bach’), which first appeared there in 1944. It is safe to say that, at that time, in no American city outside New York would nightclubs like ...”

“... with the publication of what was advertised as a four-volume ‘complete’ edition in 1938. Richard Church, an editor at Dent, wrote a strongly worded letter to Richardson arguing that a concluded Pilgrimage was absolutely necessary to, indeed was her last chance for, ‘the secure establishment of ... fame’. Richardson, wanting to keep her books in ...”

“... been a cheap thing to produce. Paper was the last stuff in Britain to come off rationing, and the price doubled. But although the circulation has gone steadily down, and the sport, or the audience for it, has grown a little remote with the years, the traditions of the sport (as well as the traditions behind it) still mean a lot to the Osmans. Colin wrote a ...”

“... of bunkum. Even he cannot resist long accounts of EFTA ministerial meetings, but these are a small price to pay for his splendidly unedifying inability to think well of his opponents and his robust capacity to pursue old rivalries beyond the grave. I never found I could harbour much sympathy with those who were deeply opposed to my convictions on fundamental ...”

“... Both the books under review, different as they are in subject-matter, scale, format, ambition and price, have this tradition in common. Both are labours of love in English fields well-trodden by Englishmen. Both books, though copiously illustrated, deserve a place on shelves as well as coffee-tables: they have something to say, as well as something to ...”

“... a prominent feature of the university world. Without the overwhelming skill of Claus Moser and Richard Layard in statistical analysis and presentation the old guard might have died slowly and hard. Although the Robbins Committee must be absolved from causing all subsequent disasters, their misfortunes and mistakes cannot be accounted small. In the first ...”

“... in the printing trade. The bulk of the forgeries were manufactured by the eminently respectable Richard Clay and Sons. The firm cannot, over a period of twenty years, have turned out a hundred or so piracies and ‘creative forgeries’ without someone noticing that their work was circulating in the second-hand market under false colours and at hugely ...”

“... is how Lévy became known as BHL after the hyping of the Nouveaux philosophes). Such is the price to be paid for leading the life of an intellectual in contempt of History, as if we were still living in the age of Sartre – the world may be subject to change, but not l’intellectuel. That these books should appeal to audiences outside France is hardly ...”

“... once acted as an extra in Ivan the Terrible and can cite all the mordant Brechtian lines about the price exacted by the cause. A note of genuine cosmopolitan disdain for the apparatchiks pervades the book. Ulbricht was not only (Wolf’s adjectives) hard-line, ruthless, authoritarian, pig-headed and heavy-handed; he also spoke – for heaven’s sake – with ...”

“... still crazy; Why make vows and try to praise me? Master,’ said this peasant lassie, ‘At your price I feel no urging To sell my state as a virgin For the whore that folks would call me.’ (Snodgrass) Jaufre Rudel, more idealistic, sang the praise of amor de lonh or ‘love from afar’, an eroticism tinged with religious yearning, while the earthier ...”

“... makes his favourite writers sound rather like a squad of marines, or weekend hikers. Writing about Richard Eberhart in 1960, for example, he claimed that ‘Eberhart ... is a prolific writer, so the metaphysical pieces may merely be poetic callisthenics to keep him fit until his next burst of creative energy.’ Of Hugh MacDiarmid in 1962: ‘He has managed a ...”

“... Van Ryn, a brash, genial American multimillionaire, and the comparatively colourless Englishman Richard Eaton, supposedly a self-portrait. The plot (a hunt for tsarist treasure, a Bolshevik scheme for world domination – plus a bit of romance) is a helter-skelter mess. Wheatley liked to talk about his ‘snakes and ladders’ technique: in effect, a ...”