“... Spain produced at the court of Alfonso X. (An official attempt to canonise Rodrigo, initiated by Philip II in 1554, failed.) In the street theatre of the 17th century, El Cid appeared as Christ, with his widow, Jimena, as his patient bride, representing all who await his second coming.By the time Spain could be spoken of as a modern nation, Rodrigo Díaz had ...”

“... intimidation by the KGB. One of his first cases was that of Zhores (the Russian spelling of the French socialist’s Jean Jaurès’s name) Medvedev, the biologist and twin brother of Roy, who had been arrested and confined in a psychiatric hospital when his ‘scandalous’ book The Rise and Fall of Lysenko was published in the West. Sakharov responded by ...”

“... Malley’s poems, nestled up against an audacious collaboration between Frank O’Hara and the French language.) Both Ashbery and Koch have included Malley in the curricula of their university poetry courses. At exam time Ashbery would present his students with two unattributed poems, one from The Darkening Ecliptic and one from Geoffrey Hill’s Mercian ...”

“... where it relates specifically to the personality of the poet, always has a teasing quality. Philip Larkin, who admired Housman officially and also less openly, had many of the same characteristics. Housman can be brutally exclamatory and immediate, though always poised. When the bells justle in the tower       The hollow night amid, Then on my ...”

“... and become a book-market researcher pure and simple. Mann’s title sails uncomfortably close to Philip Gaskell’s From Writer to Reader (OUP, 1978). Gaskell’s book, subtitled ‘Studies in Editorial Method’, was as bibliographical as the other is sociological. What intervenes between writer and reader for Gaskell is not the undifferentiated ...”

“... can be publicly disclosed. Philby makes an appearance in The Baby Sitters and a thinly disguised Philip Agee in Moscow Gold. Both put Ellison onto important leads. As with the Bond books, Salisbury delivers the requisite doses of sex, sadism and snobbery; there is much good living, genitals encounter genitals and genitals encounter electrodes at regular ...”

“... commonplace.’ Russell’s letters to other correspondents are rather less dispiriting. With the French mathematician and logician, Louis Couturat, he kept up a brisk correspondence on the Boer War, a conflict which Russell first approved because he felt British authority in Africa was at stake, then deplored because he disapproved of war and imperialism in ...”

“... and then at Queen’s; his literary life with Seamus Deane, Derek Mahon, Michael and Edna Longley, Philip Hobsbaum, and the workshop that Hobsbaum convened, the Group; and the grisly metamorphoses of Northern Irish public life, from simmering inequality and half-suppressed resentment into the worst of the Troubles. Each of these developments affected ...”

“... The North’s industrial rulers were uneasily ‘adrift on a proletarian sea’, and after the French Revolution feared drowning. There was no nation-making bargain between owners and workers to destroy the old elite. Instead, ‘the tumbrils of Paris encouraged the Westminster old guard and the new captains of industry to huddle together for mutual ...”

“... the committee would have eight members, one of whom, Jean-Baptiste de Franssu (52, French), is now president of IOR, the Vatican bank, while another, Monsignor Lucio Balda (55, Spanish), is in a prison cell charged with leaking the documents that form the basis for the two books under review. Cosea lasted ten months, fighting an increasingly ...”

“... as the most eminent doctor in the whole of the Italian peninsula, saved the son. In May 1512 the French took the son to Milan as a hostage but in October, when the Venetians retook the city, he returned and was elected to the city council. (The Venetians took the city again in 1516 after a period of three years when the Spanish held it; it was during this ...”

“... Observer in 1950 not to take the Schuman Plan too seriously and in 1955 prophesying that ‘the French will never go into the “common market”.’ Rab later remembered that, when the Dutch foreign minister came over to try to persuade Britain to join, ‘I got very bored with him and so did everyone else.’ Who were the Dutch to presume to tell the ...”

“... with Scott Fitzgerald), a ‘somewhat rackety woman’, and a character at the Oxford of Philip Larkin’s novel Jill is said to be ‘an aggressively rackety minor-public-school undergraduate’. ‘Rackety types have a link with people of the intellect,’ Powell writes in his notebook, and his novels are full of quite unintellectual types, usually ...”

“... is not sounded, and the spelling of its first citation, from Fenimore Cooper, 1827, points to the French derivation: “At the most renowned of the Parisian restaurans”.’ This is a good instance of the sort of knowledge you will pick up from Ricks and McCue’s commentary as an unexpected bonus. It illustrates their generous wish to impart as much ...”

“... My mother is such a bloody rambling fool,’ wrote Philip Larkin in 1965, ‘that half the time I doubt her sanity. Two things she said today, for instance, were that she had “thought of getting a job in Woolworth’s” and that she wanted to win the football pools so that she could “give cocktail parties” ...”