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“... the civil war in Ondaatje’s native Sri Lanka. In The English Patient (1992), a man is dying from burns in Italy amid the mayhem of the Second World War. The new novel, Warlight, unfolds – in London and Suffolk and the lower reaches of the Thames – in the grim aftermath of that war: a middle-class brother and sister, seemingly abandoned by their ...”

“... serious but highly readable, were reappearing as Ash wrote: Rosalind Mitchison, T.C. Smout and Christopher Harvie were among the most successful authors. They wrote mostly narrative or social history, revealing unknown territory to generations who had learned almost nothing of Scotland’s past at school. Now, though, the fashion is more reflexive. Tom ...”

“... involving subjective input on the part of the translator. ‘Having preserved a Scotsman in Burns’, the editor Alexander Tvardovsky said of the poet Samuil Marshak’s translation, Marshak had nevertheless ‘made him a Russian’. I might have taken this as a mere rhetorical flourish had I not, in the 1960s, heard the Soviet bard Iuly Kim singing ...”

“... Ian – chastised him ‘by banging a serving spoon on his offensively prominent ear trumpet’. Christopher Isherwood, on the other hand, found that Maugham’s stammer ‘somehow made you feel that you were stammering, not he’. Raymond Mortimer noted his ‘very violent temper’. In his later years, visitors described him as ‘saurian’ or compared ...”

“... two lovers exchanging ‘hands legs and fates’ in the winter time in the Revolution. The candle burns when Zhivago writes his poems, the emblem and essence of what lives and matters. Lara is presumably in bed and asleep. Put like that, it sounds a piece of bathos and this is the paradox of an art like Pasternak’s, which is at once totally popular and ...”

“... of being ultra-conservative.’ A Jesuit who lived under Bergoglio’s rule is quoted by Jimmy Burns in Francis: Pope of Good Promise (2015): ‘He exercised his authority with an iron fist as if he was the sole interpreter of St Ignatius Loyola.’When Jesuit priests visited poor areas, Bergoglio encouraged them to talk about religion rather than social ...”

“... concludes: ‘I see Milosz calls poetry a dividend from ourselves: high yields, mon vieux.’ Christopher Reid, the editor of this weighty selection of Heaney’s correspondence, adds disconcertingly: ‘Below the signature, in Mahon’s hand, on the actual letter in the Emory archive: “Pompous ass”.’ Was it unguarded of Heaney to take such ...”

“... of that (to us) momentous event. True, he gives a good account of two very individual poets, Burns and Blake. But those familiar with academic post-war criticism would know that the Wordsworthian concepts of Nature and Imagination have been held to define English-language Romanticism. Neither Burns nor Blake, here in ...”

“... the millennial gift books already piling up on remainder tables, 1999 marked the appearance of Christopher Ricks’s successor to Arthur Quiller-Couch’s Oxford Book of English Verse, published a hundred years ago, revised in 1939, and followed in 1972 by Helen Gardner’s New Oxford Book; of the Longman Anthology of British Literature, a brashly ...”

“... to Henry James than to Genet.Snyder makes no reference to Purdy’s close contemporary John Horne Burns, whose 1947 novel, The Gallery, had negotiated a sure-footed path through the competing claims of directness and prudence (it became a bestseller). The gallery is the Galleria Umberto 1 in Naples, a monumental shopping arcade, at least half-ruined when ...”

“... to mistake but even to betray its nature. Criticism, in any case, is no longer what it was; and Christopher Norris’s compact book on deconstruction is more useful, in its open-minded descriptive acuity, than other, more complex and defensive, treatments. Occasionally Norris falls into distancing gestures about ‘going too far’ or ‘rhapsodic ...”

“... drunk at the same fountains long before,’ Leigh Fermor explains. In Classics Transformed (1998), Christopher Stray reveals (citing a letter from Leigh Fermor) that they went on to discuss heatedly their rival pronunciations of Latin. That shared culture may actually be dead, and that story’s significance may live on only in the eye of sentiment, but I feel ...”

“... the publication of Sebastian Faulks’s percetive study of three men who died young, the painter Christopher Wood (1901-30), the war hero, Richard Hillary (1919-43), and Jeremy Wolfenden (1934-65) who was (or is?) the most spectacular failure of my Oxford generation. Faulks believes that ‘short lives are more sensitive indicators of the pressure of public ...”

“... in Scotland, I took it for granted that linguistic diversity was integral to a national culture: Burns and MacDiarmid in Scots and English, Sorley MacLean in Gaelic – and Edwin Morgan veering into Loch Ness Monsterese and Mercurian.In this spirit, I edited or co-edited four anthologies during my thirties. All contained work in English, Scots and ...”

“... to those who have one without the other. Those who have both will find that, among contemporaries, Christopher Reid and Michael Hofmann are classified as love poets but Craig Raine and Tony Harrison as blue versifiers. Only a few poets make both, including Seamus Heaney, who has two poems unworthy of him in the Whitworth (one about unfreezing a vaginal ...”