“... 186 stanzas of the ‘Testament’ are interspersed with songs, letters and ballads, some of which may not belong; in these, the voice of resignation, of the angel succumbing to his fall, is at its clearest. So is the sense of loss. The Villon we hear, even in translation, is debarred from two cities – 15th-cenrury clerical Paris and the City of God, a ...”

“... with Adam’s plucking of the forbidden fruit and astutely observes that Augustine’s point may be that, like Adam, he was tempted by company. In another incident, Augustine describes his father’s pleasure at the baths when he sees his son naked, realises that he has emerged into manhood, and will himself be a father one day. Eager to counter ...”

“... does not love me’ written in pencil, to name just a few of the 576 lots that were auctioned – may represent the most interesting event to occur in contemporary art since the death of Andy Warhol. Indeed it takes Warhol’s deification of celebrity past its absurdly logical conclusion: why pay more for a representation of Marilyn Monroe, even an Abstract ...”

“... void) maintain that British stability has little to do with the British electoral system and may rather be in spite of it. The first-past-the-post system, they insist, encourages a low turnout, because those who know their party can’t win in their constituency don’t participate, and this alienates them from the democratic process. A totally British ...”

“... books to the poetry of T.S. Eliot, from the Baedeker to the Bible. The works of other novelists may prove, as the phrase would have it, more humanly satisfying than his, but Pynchon chooses to use his immense talents as a writer and encyclopedist to show why he cannot offer satisfactions of that kind. His jaunty complaints in the Introduction that the ...”

“... he is full of fishy thinking and his charm and the charm of the subject is so great that you may easily be fooled ... so hang on to your brains.’ This is not a piece of advice that all the contributors to this volume have been willing to follow. And though this is compensated for by the distinction of many of the papers it is unfortunately true of ...”

“... a new conquest, just as it is an extraordinarily adept configuration of the field for those who may come to the subject weary from old failures to understand, or convinced that it is either marginal or obscure. What is strikingly original is that the five expositors, each of them a well-known expert in his field, have chosen to expound the central ...”

“... of history does not exempt him from repeating it. A more vivid proof, not mentioned by Butler, may be found in Ginsberg’s recent echoes of the totalitarian apologetics offered by some of the Modernists of the 1920s and 1930s. Ginsberg has placed his spiritual life in the care of a Tibetan guru (one consciously avoided by the Dalai Lama), the autocrat of ...”

“... concedes a pleasing serendipity: anthoi, logia, ‘a gathering of flowers’. The Elizabethans may have been more inventive, with their Handful of Pleasant Delights and Paradise of Dainty Devices, but an apologetic impulse remains apparent in the way they name miscellanies. How much has changed? We read The Golden Treasury or, as indicatively, The Rattle ...”

“... tide. Marchand has immensely enlarged our knowledge of Byron the man, but some of the elucidations may be plunging critics of Byron the poet into further disarray. In a clutch of new studies of Byron, it is bound to be the biography that has it easiest. It is a story set glamorously among rich and famous people, and spiced with sex, scandal and more sex. Even ...”

“... and reach a more balanced view about how central it has been within its traditions. This may well entail re-assessing Gaitskell’s attack on Clause 4 after the Party’s defeat in 1959. Morgan dismisses this initiative as ‘a victory for abstract logic over common sense’ on the ground that ‘Labour did not intend, and never had intended, to ...”

“... capital to be raised by a candidate who exploited the resentment engendered by defeat. (He may have had in mind the efficacy of the ‘who lost China?’ fantasy of the Fifties, but I don’t think that the ‘stab in the back’ psychosis of his German boyhood can have been far from his mind either.) At all events, the year 1968 found him advising the ...”

“... that Riding had had a peculiar accent: ‘Perhaps Polish Jew?’ Deborah Baker suggests that it may have been her self-consciousness about her accent that caused Riding, many years later, to talk about poetry as a place ‘where the fear of speaking in strange ways could be left behind’ and ‘as a way of speaking differently from the untidy speaking ways ...”

“... a borrower, such as The Sayings of the Desert Fathers, which she leafs through in her lunch break, may seed her thoughts with an apposite citation: ‘A time is coming when men will go mad, and when they see someone who is not mad, they will attack him, saying, “You are mad, you are not like us.”’ There seems to be no way of encompassing catastrophe, but ...”

“... re-establish order in the troops’ – a euphemism, probably, for shooting his own men. He may or may not have participated in Gabriele D’Annunzio’s freebooting occupation of Fiume in 1919, in which the poet and his cohorts seized the town for fifteen months in the name of free love, anti-feminism and publicly ...”