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“... evanescence his match is probably to be found only among choirboys, who have, however, the hope of going on to lower things, or the Elizabethan boy-actors of female roles, a class of persons on whom Wilde’s imagination played compulsively. Wilde and Douglas were not, finally, put asunder by the savagery of society, the brutality of prison or the ...”

“... short distance from the centre-left to the reactionary right. In 2009, he hailed the neocon writer Christopher Caldwell, who had claimed that Muslims are ‘conquering Europe’s cities, street by street’, as a brilliant seer, who understood the consequences of undermining ‘national tradition’ with ‘liberal universalism’. It may be unfair to pick on ...”

“... neither Conrad nor James would have known what to do with. In a letter to Conrad, he expressed the hope that his descriptions of trench warfare might come in handy should his eminent colleague ever decide to do anything ‘in this line’, or want to ‘put a phrase into the mouth of someone in Bangkok who had been, say, to Bécourt’. There is no sign of the ...”

“... Cherkley Court, and there would open the interconnecting door between her bedroom and his in the hope that she would signify consent by leaving it ajar. Once, when he was talking about a woman with whom he (rightly) suspected Pincher was having an affair, he ‘puckered his face into a leery smile’ and declared: ‘I bet she’s got a big bush!’ Pincher ...”

“... of elegies for the dead interspersed with similes, and pares away almost all narrative elements. Christopher Logue’s dazzling paraphrases adopt a fragmentary form which appears to have been broken apart by the violence it represents, which is often grotesque (‘His neck was cut clean through/Except for a skein of flesh off which/His head hung down like a ...”

“... public interest. In the same period one can see a parallel ambition in the attempts by Eliot and Christopher Fry to write verse drama – not altogether encouraging examples, to be sure, but animated by a similar desire to see poetry as a recognised, familiar medium for communal as well as private experience. In the 1930s, Day-Lewis and his friends had ...”

“... The radical English Protestant sects – Diggers, Ranters, Seekers and the like – applauded by Christopher Hill in The World Turned Upside Down (1972) challenged ecclesiastical hierarchies by maintaining that all matter was endued with spirit, that God was present in the fabric of nature, even that God and nature were one. No need for an external spiritual ...”

“... mechanical. Libertinism, here, is less a choice than a ‘hedonistic repetition-compulsion’, in Christopher Tilmouth’s words: ‘each kind Night returnes’ and with it the speaker and his roll-call of mistresses, until, one day, they don’t. No one, especially not the libertine, is getting out alive. The double use of the verb ‘change’ reveals who ...”

“... Mailer read the book in galley and told Podhoretz he liked it. It was Podhoretz’s hope after the volley of abuse from nearly every quarter that Mailer would ride to the cavalry rescue. But when Mailer’s essay on Making It, ‘Up the Family Tree’, appeared in the spring 1968 issue of Partisan Review (grisly particulars to follow), it was an ...”

“... seized him just before the Battle of Naseby.’In his rumbustious biography God’s Englishman, Christopher Hill diagnoses Cromwell as a manic depressive. When evaluating his performance in government, Hill, as a Marxist, was more plainspoken than some liberal historians, who tend to be mealy-mouthed and cower in the shadow of Thomas Carlyle and the Great ...”

“... attended By a strong siding champion Conscience. – O welcom pure-ey’d Faith, white-handed Hope, Thou hovering Angel girt with golden wings, And thou unblemish’t form of Chastity. ‘Calling shapes’ and ‘beckning shadows dire’ – those ultra-Miltonic participles become disembodied moral threats on the edges of the Lady’s vision. This is ...”

“... industry. Boxes began to come in different shapes and sizes. Respectable neighbourhoods could hope for a bit of roof, and two or three walls. ‘The new and growing underclass, meanwhile, would have to settle for a sawn-off metal stump with an armoured cardphone bolted onto it.’ Scott’s totemic cubicles disappeared from the streets. Many of them have ...”

“... whose curiosity leads him to steal a magic ointment from a witch, and rub it on himself in the hope of turning into an owl. Instead, he turns into a donkey, that most put-upon and slavish of animals, and endures a series of cruel and brutal humiliations – as well as having various interesting sexual experiences – before finally eating roses, which ...”

“... produced in a single instant of scholarly insight. Chapman’s version is quite different. Like Christopher Logue’s violent adaptations of the Iliad, it testifies to a lifetime’s battle with thoughts and afterthoughts, a continual argument between the translator’s own preoccupations and his sense of what is distinctive to Homer. Chapman’s project ...”

“... Two other works throw light on this, and Littell seems to have studied both of them. One is Christopher Browning’s Ordinary Men: Reserve Police Battalion 101 (1992), which revealed that the men of a police unit that systematically shot the Jewish inhabitants of one village after another were not Nazi fanatics or passionate anti-semites. They were ...”