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“... to which the testimony of famous alumni has contributed. Guardian readers have now been told that Philip Larkin and Kingsley Amis called their Old English texts ‘ape’s bum-fodder’. But if these readers get no further than the preface to the Companion, they will see what another Oxford wit, W.H. Auden, said of the same material: ‘I was spellbound. This ...”

“... the poem read as being about what it proclaims as its subject: Alexander the Great remembering Philip of Macedon.’ The middle stanza of ‘From an Asian Tent’ reads: You held me once before the army’s eyes; During their endless shout, I tired and slid Down past your forearms to the cold surprise Your plated shoulder made between my thighs. This ...”

“... from treating detective stories as historical documents through a close study of which reliable short biographies of their protagonists may be built up. In this scholarly activity numerous difficulties, needless to say, confront the biographer. Mr H. R. F. Keating has been driven to the conclusion that Hercule Poirot was aged 130 (or a little more) at the ...”

“... to be who she is. And that – apart from a grandmother of nine and the author of a novel, several short stories, and a number of children’s books published under her maiden name, Jean Howard – is a woman half of whose life was spoilt by mental illness. ‘My Golders Green, where I lived till I was twelve,’ she writes, ‘was all green dusted with ...”

“... government which might be found of service. Literature and Nationalism, essays dedicated to Philip Edwards, comes from the university world of literary studies. Though the book spends some time on Shakespeare’s view of the Welsh and Scots, the main emphasis is on Ireland – understandably, given the literary achievement of Irish writers in the early ...”

“... tradition of the op with intellectual pretensions: from Sherlock Holmes’s scientific dabbling to Philip Marlowe, who played chess games against himself between assignments. Further trickery comes by way of alcohol: not the whisky that Shakespeare consumes (Bushmills at the low end, Lagavulin on a splurge), but the stuff served up by the Irish pub’s inept ...”

“... the same pitch at the same time. Girtin, Sandby and their successors, Cotman and the tantalisingly short-lived Richard Bonington, captured as no painters before them had the most delicate effects of weather – clouds seen through other clouds, woods in a mist of rain – and, once aquatint was perfected, their work could be reproduced with tolerable ...”

“... It’s not just Victorian models that make The Casual Vacancy seem a bit thin and monochrome. Philip Hensher’s King of the Badgers, published last year, also has a West Country setting (frankly Devonian), not to mention a self-consciously pretty town trying to set itself apart from a larger settlement nearby, disowning any connection with a hinterland ...”

“... is his daemon seems at home with its homelessness. ‘The Tree-House’, one of the better of the short poems in Cathures, has Morgan climbing into a tree-house, surveying the world below, then gazing at ‘the high, the uncapturable’ clouds. It’s a happy poem. But – sitting comfortably some way above the world and contemplating what’s higher still ...”

“... to Egypt, writing regularly for opposition newspapers. He published a novel, a novella and some short stories (collected in 2004 under the title Friendly Fire), none of which made much of an impression. Meanwhile, he practised as a dentist in Cairo. The stories his wealthy and influential patients told him while sitting in his chair became the basis of The ...”

“... procession is seditious, menacing, propelled by a wild music – part carnivalesque, part dirge (Philip Miller is the composer) – and by the moves of a jubilant dancer, in silhouette like the rest of the troupe. Elsewhere in the piece, we’re asked to think about time as if it weren’t the thing we experience. That’s not easy: just as ideas about the ...”

“... writing took a quantum leap. Great Granny Webster was shortlisted for the Booker Prize in 1977 (Philip Larkin nixed it because he said it wasn’t fiction). There, too, matriarchal relations are haunted by a phantom man – in this case a father – but the narrator is all eye and ear, the better to capture the indelible characters of Granny Webster and ...”

“... have mastered the intricacies of the Belgrano affair. Julian Haviland, Anthony Bevins and Philip Webster of the Times would all pass with first-class honours any finals examination in Belgrano Studies: but as members of the House of Commons Lobby, they necessarily have to give their attention to every ephemeral political event and could not devote ...”

“... they were unwittingly providing concepts so elastic that they could stretch to a thousand short-term excuses. Setbacks were thus reinterpreted as temporary aberrations or explained away in hindsight as necessary detours. The Left has thus been comforted through many a season of adversity by a perversely indomitable sense that, in the long run, history ...”

“... neither simply the writer himself nor a delegated fictional character but a kind of semi-fictional short-cut to an idea in the making. The essay, we might say, is the place where thoughts can have a hero – as distinct from novels, where heroes and others just have thoughts. When Musil says that Thomas Mann and others ‘write for people who are ...”