“... 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 ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... rest, is geared only to damage limitation and the remedying of disasters, it represents the best hope of avoiding litigation, not by the time-honoured devices of closing ranks and withholding information but by anticipatory planning against the occurrence of mishaps. It needs to be remembered that medicine, like the legal process, does not guarantee to get ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... his lap. Although de Pury modestly concedes that it would be an exaggeration to compare him to Christopher Columbus, he does want us to believe that he is a great explorer. He claims to have spotted Richter when he was still an ‘emerging’ artist. He hasn’t the slightest doubt that ‘contemporary art’ is ‘the New Old Masters’. When, in ...”

“... inch a mandarin’ – and the political scientist Colin Leys. Qualified praise goes to Christopher Hill; there are fond memories of Tariq Ali (who contests one or two details in the memoir). Johnson remembers Hodgkin, a dogged adversary of Pretoria, refusing to sign a petition in favour of anti-apartheid activists who’d torn up the cricket ground ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... to be sectioned. They told her to come back on Monday. Readers secure in their hearing can hope to sharpen their intuition when confronted with odd-seeming bits of behaviour – perverse restaurant choice, for instance. ‘What about Mash?’ they’d say. I’d remember the scrape of crockery and the roar like an aircraft hangar. ‘Sort of,’ I’d ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... 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 ...”