“... an illusion. This is the hell most modern folk enter when they feel worthless; it is not dull to read about because negation is enacted through a surprising wealth of images. In one episode the poet shelters in the porch of a deserted church. It contains a sculpture of a sphinx menacing an angel holding an upright sword. Dozing, the poet is wakened by a ...”

“... pacifists, anarchists, sexual revolutionaries, feminists, nudists and so on, many of whom also read and assimilated Nietzsche and Freud after their own cranky fashion. Let me give some more examples. Kafka was a vegetarian, went to a nudist colony for a cure, admired Dalcroze and made a pilgrimage to his dance centre at Hellerau, was deeply impressed by ...”

“... and vigorous study, which carries the reader along despite its many technical details, can be read either as a celebration of trade unions or as a eulogy of the small businessman (on occasion businesswoman), for in this city there was no sharp division between the two. As the author plausibly suggests, the links between capital and labour, so much closer ...”

“... But then Pauline is malicious; and her dialogue with her malicious self is there for us to read in her own words. Nanapush says of her: ‘The practice of deception with her was so constant that it became a kind of truth.’ Envious curiosity makes her potently knowledgeable: ‘She was the crow of the reservation, she lived off our scraps, and she ...”

“... brutal the treatment of children. Edward Shorter’s The Making of the Modern Family (1975), now read in many European countries, defiantly announced that mothers have not always loved their offspring. Lawrence Stone, whose book Family, Sex and Marriage in England, 1500-1800 (1977) prints some horrifying passages about maternal indifference and neglect. When ...”

“... by Stoic writers such as Seneca in particular. Seneca, who was, after all, a Spaniard, was much read in 17th-century Spain, especially in the court milieu. Olivares was represented as a second Seneca in a play by Quevedo, and the Count-Duke’s own library contained a number of works by the Neo-Stoic writer Justus Lipsius. It may not be altogether fanciful ...”

“... Kregel on Harrod, by M.K. Anyadike-Danes on Robertson, and by Susan Howson on Hawtrey, will be read with profit by anyone interested in what precisely divided Keynes from those of his contemporaries with whom he shared so much. The Policy Consequences of John Maynard Keynes is also the outcome of a centenary conference held in 1983, and it reveals a wide ...”

“... Ben Nicholson, was published in 1937. Although they roped in a few contributors, such as Herbert Read, who were willing to give the Surrealists (for example) the time of day, only non-representational painting, abstract sculpture and asymmetrical and undecorated architecture are illustrated. The names on the cover show native troops stiffened by a strong ...”

“... Until this week I had read no work written by G.M. Trevelyan since my schooldays. No Cambridge supervisor that I can recall ever recommended any of his books, and I have certainly never prescribed them to my own students. Like most people, I knew – or thought I knew – that he had defined social history as ‘history with the politics left out’, and that he was one of the chief stuffed carcasses in the mausoleum of Whig history ...”

“... Seamus Deane that we must bring nothing of ourselves, of our personal experience to a poem when we read. A poem was a verbal structure, and our job was to define the nature of its structure. Thus a poem could be read in the same way by a student in Kenya, at Oxford, in Philadelphia, in darkest Australia and here in ...”

“... think I don’t need to. My first reading, before any reviews appeared, concurs with what I took Peter Ackroyd to be saying on Kaleidoscope, that the bulk of the narrative can be read and enjoyed in a moderately literal way as a mystery story set in London, even though the mystery turns out to be not soluble at this ...”

“... of narrative in The Penguin Book of Contemporary British Poetry being so widely and respectfully read, and well-directed too, since it clarifies what’s confused in the Penguin introduction by the editors’ simultaneous recommendation of Post-Modernist ‘secrecy’ and the Keatsian ‘long poem’. The kind of story which flows from A to Z is clearly not ...”

“... Four possible candidates, varying in attainments, would be T.E. Lawrence, Robert Graves, Peter Fleming (perhaps both Flemings) and Richard Hughes. It makes no difference that Lawrence was half-Irish, the Flemings mostly Scottish, and Hughes partly Welsh. The presidential or father figure of the group would be John Buchan, another Scot, whose innings ...”

“... it liked to boost its profits. The speculators and get-rich-quick merchants date from long before Peter Rachman’s Sixties and the Yuppie Eighties. In the history of London, Porter suggests, greed had carte blanche. The free-for-all continued, with neither local nor Parliamentary government overseeing London’s growth, until the setting up of the London ...”

“... it, or at least he has not found it in anything like the shape any of us imagined it, and having read this book, I am prepared to accept, like a reformed gold-digger on the Sierra Madre, that Wilsonia never existed: that there never was a simple, secret explanation for Wilson’s resignation. His own explanation was probably true – he had had enough. It is ...”