“... Walcott’s extravagance of poetic diction and tendency to verbosity off-putting in the past’ (Peter Porter); ‘I feel that the fuss and the language are not quite justified by the donné’ (Roy Fuller). Derek Walcott has suffered, perhaps more than any other contemporary poet writing in English, from accusations that his work is too showy. Some of the ...”

“... essayists and tellers of unpopular truths, and now, spurred by the appearance four years ago of Peter Davison’s marvellously thorough complete edition of Orwell’s writings (and no doubt with an eye on Orwell’s centenary, which falls this year), he has written a short book entirely devoted to telling us, as the title of the US edition has it, ‘Why ...”

“... When the name of a present-day Catholic theologian becomes familiar to the larger reading public, it is rarely because of his theology. Most often it is because he has been made vivid as a character in one of those miniature scenarios about religion which still fascinate the ostensibly secularised mind. Jean Daniélou’s fine book on the doctrine of the Trinity passed largely unnoticed: his death in circumstances which suggested that there might be a scandal to be unearthed secured the immediate attention of journalists all over the world ...”

“... of Albertine de Staël, probably Constant’s daughter) gives an account of one such reading, at Madame Récamier’s, where Constant broke into sobs as he neared the end: everyone present, already very moved, began crying as well; soon the room was full of weeping and moaning; then suddenly, as the result of a psychological mechanism which is ...”

“... remember how the moment of perception – and idolatry of the sense datum – dominated painting. Reading art history, one imagines the painters of the world getting into huddles and saying: ‘Well lads, what next?’ Irwin has answered the question – having asked it of himself – several times. One of the most attractive aspects of avant-garde art is ...”

“... explain away the lack of class-consciousness among the proletariat as a whole. Capitalism, on this reading, was able to buy off the potential leaders of the working class, whose subsequent conservatism played an indispensable role in sustaining the status quo. In this form the argument has several weaknesses, which have been cogently summarised in a well-known ...”

“... afternoon in front of the computer, debugging a program, or working on an article. If they do any reading at all it’s likely to be a matter of checking a reference in a scientific journal before citing it in a footnote. Perhaps they return a few phone calls or reply to computer mail. Von Neumann’s legacy is at the centre of a number of the pieces of New ...”

“... except by acclamation, persuasion and the marketplace. This view of things must colour any reading of Roos’s Early Impressionism and the French State. She writes about the Salon and its politics, which are peripheral if one has already decided that no politics or institution had much to do with the large-scale changes which took place in ...”

“... that busy Treasury officials did not sit around debating what they had learned in their bedtime reading of the General Theory. It was a work, as Keynes said in the preface, ‘chiefly addressed to my fellow economists’. That certainly included Hawtrey, the only professional economist in the Treasury, though correspondingly removed from the hurly-burly of ...”

“... budgets. But it was what American Keynesians often preached, and Schumpeter was not alone in his reading of Keynes’s message. Nor was Schumpeter egregious in seizing on the famous observation about being dead in the long run. It obviously showed him, and demonstrated for the benefit of others, Keynes’s short-term irresponsibility. Yet the point that ...”

“... soul-stripping illness whose details Bayley did not spare. After her death in 1999 things sped up. Peter Conradi’s portly authorised biography was smartly challenged by A.N. Wilson’s slimmer unauthorised memoir, Iris Murdoch as I Knew Her, a witty, affectionate, impious account which made disturbing suggestions about Bayley’s feelings towards his ...”

“... came across versions of themselves or their foibles being lavishly ridiculed. During a communal reading of the sixth volume of Sir Charles Grandison, she came to a passage she heartily wished she could avoid. Charlotte’s mockery of Aunt Nell’s treasured but rather pathetic letter-case (containing ‘but a few letters’, and filled instead with faded ...”

“... which his father had once shown him; here the circle was complete.’ A sceptic might ask how Peter Ackroyd knows that Dickens’s face bore an infantile look in death? No one there seems to have recorded the fact. Was Ackroyd, like Scrooge, transported to the room by the spirit of biography past? How does Ackroyd know that Dickens’s final mental state ...”

“... but it is usually harder to arbitrate between the claims of mental breadth and concentration. Reading Off the Rails by Lisa St Aubin de Teran, however, a memoir in which she brings us up to date with her 35-year ‘lifetime of truancy and escape’, a career of spontaneously marrying, travelling and writing, will make many readers feel that the loss of ...”

“... real world and an ideal alternative. Both Jack Zipes’s The Wounded Storyteller and Peter Wortsman’s ‘The Golden Pot’ and Other Tales of the Uncanny include translations of ‘The Sandman’, Hoffmann’s most famous text. ‘The Sandman’, the ur-text on the Doppelgänger, has been the object of a dizzying number of readings, among them ...”