“... success. In The Face of the Deep, Rossetti’s line-by-line commentary on the Apocalypse, her reading of Revelation 18, in which the merchants cry ‘Alas’ to fallen Babylon, puts her in mind of fallen England:Alas any whom the unknown day and hour find unprepared! From the folly of the foolish virgins, Good Lord, deliver us. And looking around us ...”

“... sustained poem ‘The Most Difficult Position’, republished in Selected Poems: 1954-1982. Reading it and others there, I wondered with which idea of the game Fuller’s work shows more affinity. Fuller, who has published a useful critical work on W.H. Auden, is an inheritor of the poet’s later attitude to the art. When, in his English phase, Auden ...”

“... more than their due). The abstraction of economic man was no longer needed when a judicious reading of history could produce his clone. By the time of Marshall, Political Science had achieved its place in the syllabus at Cambridge – one of the high points in any triumphalist account. When the great Maitland was dining as a guest at Trinity Hall, the ...”

“... signalled Bonn speech came a mere six months into that premiership. What is remarkable, in reading this full and fairly sympathetic biography of Major, is how soon the note changes from one of optimism, celebration of the rise to power, and hope of constructive achievements, to one of fatalism, extenuation and despair. Even Major’s surprise victory ...”

“... was a product of a flawed and abridged translation is false. Indeed, the opposite is the case: a reading of the full text, far from resolving or dissolving the difficulties, seems only to confirm them, and historians are unlikely to prove any less carping in the future. Its historical shortcomings are patent, but it should not be forgotten that when Foucault ...”

“... and whimsicalities into the author of ‘Sunday Morning’, ‘The Emperor of Ice-Cream’ and ‘Peter Quince at the Clavier’.Stevens met Elsie Viola Moll (née Kachel) in June 1904, during a visit to his hometown of Reading, Pennsylvania. He had been living in New York since 1900, and had discovered the hard way that ...”

“... was less likely than his contemporaries to be seen in his full complexity and thereby reassessed. Peter Stanford, prompted and supported by Day-Lewis’s widow, the actress Jill Balcon, has now undertaken the work of recovery, and he makes clear that he believes this biography should provide the occasion for a major reassessment of his subject’s standing as ...”

“... have the final say, insofar as their intentions can be ascertained, as to what we actually end up reading. He has accordingly incorporated the nine minor corrections and revisions that Woolf made in a second impression of September 1925 and in a third of September 1929. Of the various errors which have in his view ‘disfigured’ almost all of the many ...”

“... In one of John Berryman’s more lucid dream songs (No. 364), there is amusing reference to the reading habits of Henry, the song sequence’s screwed up protagonist: O Henry in his youth read many things he gutted the Columbia – the Cambridge libraries – Widener – Princeton – the British Museum – the Library of Congress but mostly he bought books to have as his own cunningly, like extra wings ...”

“... a quotation from one of them, is if anything worse.) After this, it is a relief to learn from Peter Levi’s lively and delightful biography that Dr Zhivago (Dr Alive) was a name Pasternak had seen on the cover of a Moscow manhole, rather as Dickens claimed to have spotted a Copperfield and a Chuzzlewit on the signs of poor London shops. Quite apart from ...”

“... of the belief that Hitler has a specific history in German Romanticism. It is a delusion which Peter Paret and especially William Vaughan are quite ready to take for reality, while Norman Stone’s own dreams about ‘the positive qualities of Hitler, his real achievements’ (thus Professor J.H. Plumb’s Introduction) aid and abet it: if Hitler was some ...”

“... debonair correspondent who emerges from Letters and Documents. This volume makes fascinating reading, and anyone interested in Kierkegaard the man will find it impossible to put down. This is not only the first good translation of a certain part of Kierkegaard’s work, it is also the first. The original collection was put out by Professor Niels ...”

“... he was. ‘I have been screaming with laughter for several days on end,’ Nancy reports, after reading a life of Queen Victoria. The French General Election of 1953? ‘Oh, the election! Never has anything been so hysterically funny.’ (Never?) In 1967, reading about the increased number of coloured immigrants to ...”

“... minutes. It was Anita Brookner’s novel Look at me. The sight of a man sitting on his own and reading a book must have struck the lady as in some way peculiar and worthy of investigation, for she descended from her dais and gracefully approached the little table. ‘I see you are very, very deep in that book,’ she said, giggling gently. ‘I expect it ...”

“... these events from the point of view of three related personae: the thoughtful Jewish New Yorker, reading the novels of Victor Serge or reconsidering the Rosenberg case; the compulsive film aficionado, intrigued by the representation of the Communist world in Soviet films, Hollywood movies and the work of the East European New Wave directors, such as Gyula ...”