“... subjected to repression, censorship and persecution under communist regimes during the Cold War was heroic. To assist individual writers in economic distress he conceived an ad hoc fund that channelled donations from an all-star roster of American authors, including William Styron, Bellow, Alison Lurie and Gore Vidal; even Irving Howe chipped in. It was ...”

“... terms by two years – a move which many see as the determination of the new political class to cling to office for as long as possible. Yeltsin’s memoirs don’t make it much easier to understand the contradictions. They are much more readable and interesting than those the notables of the Gorbachev era wrote, but that isn’t saying much. The ...”

“... of the ‘professional’ philosophical reaction; it reveals as much about the diversity of post-war philosophy as about the gulf between Marxism and analytical philosophy. Modern linguists, literary theorists, some dissident social scientists, were much more open to these European influences; that they made so little headway elsewhere merely proved what an ...”

“... Hawksmoor’s building: ‘I’ve never raped. I’ve never mugged. I’ve never robbed a working-class home.’ As he sank away towards the underworld of the crypt, we ascended the hierarchical steps to hear music by Messiaen and Hans Werner Henze. The frisson was undeniable. Earlier this year I went back to visit the disused synagogue at 19 Princelet Street ...”

“... Italy, in the early years of the century. The territory was fought over in the Second World War, and Anna’s own father is a shadowy Eighth Army officer described only as ‘plump and clumsy and mostly bald’. It is her grandfather’s life which appeals to her imagination, a life which she considers ‘lost’ because she is so anxious to recover ...”

“... dense woman who at the time she met Mew had just published a novel featuring the mixed gymnastics class at the Marylebone Polytechnic and was engaged in setting up the Medico-Psychological Clinic of London. Mew made, if not a pass (Mrs Fitzgerald is stern with Sinclair’s biographer, Theophilus Boll, who computed the number of times she bounded over the ...”

“... serious interest, which means that three of the six sitting PS Deputies have to be dumped: virtual war between the six and their clients ensues. On the right the situation is no easier. Le Pen’s Front National (FN) is bound to take 8-9 per cent and thus one of the seats, but the Giscardian Centre-Right, the UDF, will run its own list and probably get 20 per ...”

“... than its American manifestation does a Harvard Book. But anyone looking for the full range of post-war US poetry will have to turn elsewhere. Sharing Harold Bloom’s commitment to ‘the transcendental strain’, Vendler differs over how we should read it. What she values is less the Sublime than its epistemology. While Bloom cries up the heroic Emersonian in ...”

“... in 1819, ‘except poor dear me – I have been more ravished myself than anybody since the Trojan war.’ Byron used the same tactics towards society at large as he used with women. There is a curious mixture of apparent indifference and real avidity in his attitude to social success, which Raphael understands and describes very well. ‘The more society ...”

“... of anxiety and of purpose runs through the successive generations of the 17th-century ruling class. Yet amidst the pronounced similarities between the three crises there were differences too. The cry, voiced so often at the crisis of Charles II’s reign, that ‘Forty-One is come again’ shows that contemporaries interpreted the bewildering events ...”

“... Until then, Baba Amro was considered a ‘liberated neighbourhood’.It’s the sort of working-class neighbourhood at the outskirts of the city where the middle classes normally never set foot, a neighbourhood of four or five-storey concrete buildings, sometimes covered in sheets of polished stone and usually unfinished, each squeezed up next to the other ...”

“... Cornell spent most of his life at 3708 Utopia Parkway in Queens, a plain middle-class house where he lived with his widowed mother and his younger brother Robert, who suffered from cerebral palsy. He was known in the neighbourhood as a loner who collected odds and ends, as a silent member of the Christian Science Church, as a ‘scary ...”

“... Woodcut’, Boyle remarks that ‘English poetry, whose vehicle is the language of a profoundly class-conscious culture, lacks the middle tone between verse and doggerel in which this poem like most of Faust, is written.’ Many people have wondered why it is so hard to get Goethe to sound even creditable in English, let alone like a major poet, and this is ...”

“... revealed to visiting and expatriate Americans from the Gilded Age to the Jazz Age, and after World War Two they returned to see if it was still as it had been. In 1929, the young M.F.K. Fisher had her initiation chez Aux Trois Faisans in Dijon – ‘safe in a charmed gastronomical circle’, having ‘seen the far shores of another world’. In the 1950s, the ...”

“... score an easy triumph by anticipating the answer with some textbook formula.’ The First World War, which killed Raymond and many of his playmates, provides the inevitable coda to their story: spattering the beautiful dream with blood, rendering the past futile, and disarranging the future. In its aftermath came the collapse of the aristocratic ...”