“... coming years. It is useful to list these measures, all taken or announced in the four months from May to August 1979, not so much in order to add to the predictable groans of vice-chancellors, students and university staffs, as to wonder what it is that the new conservatism seems to mean which is so fashionable a subject in the salons of London (and of other ...”

“... Kool-Aid had been poured, darkened perceptibly’. That the artist’s wholly conscious intention may well be realised in a passage like this doesn’t matter in the least: we still wince, finding the repellent cuteness quite untransmuted. Though Jeffrey’s solemn pedantry is the source of much of this excess, it also contributes moments of startling ...”

“... and only growing ill-health, which resulted in a tragically painful death from cancer in 1958, may have prevented him from rising higher still, perhaps to the Foreign Office. Had he lived, some surmised, he might well have been prominent in the struggle for the Tory succession in the early Sixties. It was a strange, meteoric career, the product of ...”

“... and exotic beliefs are commonplace. Puck and his meinie can walk without fear of mocking. And so may the critic. The author and readers of Watership Down have no sense of being caught stooping. What diverts is Tolkein’s ‘arresting strangeness’ of the art of the storyteller. Nowhere is this more clear than in the work of Alan Garner, whose imagination ...”

“... elliptical narratives that once would have been told at far greater length. Aesthetically, this may be a gain. Such a contracted form must preserve the strongest flavours, the crises of passion, sensation, eccentricity or pathos; what gets left out is the mashed potatoes of descriptive realism. But seen as a social phenomenon, which it also is, the novel so ...”

“... me, but in the end he will bore me merely, I know.’ (The editorial note says that ‘Hilda’ may have been Hilda Doolittle – the poet H.D. I doubt it.) Lawrence’s answer to Forster’s question – ‘how do you know I’m not dead?’ – hasn’t survived. There is more in Forster ‘than ever comes out’, he told Russell, ‘but he is not dead ...”

“... believe that it has a more sinister implication than Professor Hough would allow. The 13th Cycle may be the realm of an ultimate freedom. It may be the realm into which the Cuchulainn of the plays would pass were he to offer his history as legend to the world. It may be the God that is ...”

“... to blackmail Europeans in Arab countries since they are always breaking Islamic laws in ways which may or may not be tolerated by the authorities. When a British girl falls to her death from a balcony, at Kemp’s dodgy-alcohol party for his fellow expatriates, we are reminded of news items about similar deaths in suspicious ...”

“... quasi-autonomous research establishment, funded in perpetuity by an inattentive government. EHE may well have exhausted its mission, or lost its intellectual drive, and the right thing to do might well be to close it down or merge it with some other establishment. However wisely a research programme may have been ...”

“... that some of us have come to expect and delight in, it provides others that many readers may well prefer. And after all the signs were always there, if we had cared to look. Rereading in The Occasions of Poetry Gunn’s essay on Ben Jonson, one notices for the first time how difficult he finds it to enter into Jonson’s world. The difficulties can ...”

“... is not lived out within the context of a single set of synchronous events, however neatly they may appear to fit together into a single functioning whole. And that perhaps is the main point in Marc Augé’s slim volume of critical essays. He perceives the various schools of anthropology, both past and present, as identified with three primary axes which ...”

“... and For Launcelot Andrewes? Did F.L. Lucas really write, unremarked, that Eliot may have been indebted to something called ‘Childe Harold to the Dark Tower Came’? Yes he did, actually. But the editing and printing of these books are so slovenly that, half-unjustly, one is inclined to give everybody else the benefit of the doubt. Meeting ...”

“... But since our only national cult is the Royal Family, James Agate’s less flattering verdict may also be more appropriate: ‘The English instinctively admire any man who has no talent and is modest about it.’ Other nations’ great men, however, are a different matter. Perhaps because Napoleon was born on one small island and died on another, many of ...”

“... others was his apparent failure to recognise Scott’s antagonism towards him. This antagonism may have been rooted in the fact that Gran was Norwegian. Before Amundsen announced his intention to sail south, Gran’s being Norwegian was little problem, but after Amundsen’s famous, brutally terse telegram reached Scott in Melbourne, it was a different ...”

“... practical jokes. But he was fearless, and an inspired mechanic. When he took off at dawn on 20 May 1927 for his historic flight across the Atlantic, the runway at Roosevelt Field, New York, was sodden; The Spirit of St Louis was carrying a thousand pounds more weight than ever before, and its engine was not generating full power because of the ...”