“... 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 ...”

“... it and let me know – there’s no hurry. I know you’ll make a marvellous literary executor. I hope you don’t mind my asking – if you find the idea too much of a bore, just say so – but I think you’ll have quite an interesting time going through all my letters and so on and deciding what ought to be done with them. And by the way, if you do feel ...”

“... and outlives the majority of human passions: Dante’s is one of those which one can only just hope to grow up to at the end of life. This is a fine tribute not only to the verse that caused the hit that causes the shudder, but to the wholeness that is required for its accommodation. I suppose that in the nature of the case, when the poets concerned are ...”

“... blunders of the German elite’ can’t be made to shoulder all the blame. In The Sleepwalkers, Christopher Clark deploys on a grander scale and over a much longer timeframe essentially the same argument.* ‘The protagonists of 1914,’ he writes at the end, ‘were sleepwalkers, watchful but unseeing, haunted by dreams, yet blind to the reality of the ...”

“... always, the over-fertility of Empson’s mind, and the frantic pseudo-discipline he applied in the hope of controlling that fertility. Complex words are complex because of the range of social attitudes they can imply, and because of the range of senses they have, and because of their distinctive histories, and because of the particular circumstances in which ...”