“... a book of unrevised lectures called Varieties of Parable and a Collected Poems. Even now, with Peter McDonald’s intelligently re-edited Collected, we do not have all the MacNeice we could ask for. As McDonald points out, a Complete Poems would be considerably larger than the 600-odd pages of verse plus seven appendices of fugitive poems, prefaces and ...”

“... mettle in the towns, where they could prepare for government once the Red Army had come through. Peter Conradi handles this material extremely well, and draws on E.P. Thompson’s lectures in Stanford in 1981 about his brother, later collated by his widow, Dorothy Thompson, as Beyond the Frontier. E.P. is more committed than Conradi to the idea that Frank ...”

“... Charlotte, Blanche, Helen, Jackki, Jorie and the exquisite Mabs, ‘a manicurist with a small green scorpion tattoo’. Several of Carstairs’s lovers were black, though none, as it happened, Bahamian: in her intimate life Carstairs preferred the sophisticated women she encountered on annual holidays in New York and the Riviera to local beauties. No such ...”

“... is a derivative literariness that projects its own tittering onto the subject: the giggling, gray-green roar that fills a gorge (sweet Thames! run softly) old books refer to as the   vale of Tempe ... Eliotic echoes of that calibre belong (sec above) to journalism. For all her reputation as a poet, Clampitt frequently seems ripe for the travel pages of ...”

“... selling second-hand furniture at a flea market, proved a comfortable base. With his red hair, green eyes and pale complexion, al-Suri passed easily for a European and soon enough he was one: in 1987 he married Elena Moreno Cruz, a left-wing student of philology who converted to Islam and helped him become a Spanish citizen. They moved to Granada and began ...”

“... change the nature of the regime? Either way, the true nature of the protests is being missed. The green colours adopted by the Mousavi supporters and the cries of ‘Allahu akbar!’ that resonated from the roofs of Tehran in the evening darkness suggested that the protesters saw themselves as returning to the roots of the 1979 Khomeini revolution, and ...”

“... Sayers tried the same trick in The Documents in the Case, her only crime novel not featuring Lord Peter Wimsey, but it was her least successful book: too many competing voices drowned out the plot. (Van Dine’s 16th rule: ‘A detective novel should contain … no literary dallying with side-issues … They hold up the action and introduce issues irrelevant ...”

“... the SWP had recruited various politicians and celebrities to an Anti-Nazi League. They included Peter Hain, an anti-apartheid activist who was now working for the postal workers’ union and had recently joined the Labour Party; Neil Kinnock, an up-and-coming Welsh MP from the party’s far left; and the actress Miriam Karlin, famous for playing a bolshie ...”

“... have not attended to the ‘current tendency’, Ludmilla Jordanova stamps her foot in the Bethnal Green Museum: ‘Social differences in clothing are not mentioned, nor are prices given. In fact, a number of the cases clearly contain expensive, hand-made or exclusive clothes. To imply that all children at a given time – the cases are structured by period ...”

“... the grave on how the work should be published. In a forthcoming essay on Walpole as an historian, Peter Sabor comments on the way that ‘the preposterously Gothic arrangements by which Walpole preserved his history unread until generations after his death played into the hands of expurgators, conflators, and hostile commentators.’ Yet the passages now ...”

“... resent is that most of Shelley’s poems – except for ‘Letter to Maria Gisborne’ and ‘Peter Bell the Third’, which might have been written by a good Augustan – were written by Julian rather than by Maddalo. Such readers have always wanted ‘heard melodies’ to sound for ‘those unheard’, and they deride as spiritual vanity any apparently ...”

“... that Europe acts only if the rights of multinationals and banks are at stake: Brussels gave the green light to negotiations over new IMF loans only after central bank independence had been assured. Concerns over the independence of the judiciary will be dealt with by the European Court, which usually takes for ever. Suspicion of Brussels has been encouraged ...”

“... magazine Oxford Poetry in 1930. In his excellent introduction to this definitive Complete Poetry, Peter Robinson characterises Spencer as an unconfident poet who, when his luck was in, wrote poems that were ‘profoundly uncertain’: ‘within his small oeuvre, poem after poem sounds true. That sound sense of reliable poetry was achieved under the shadow of ...”

“... outward glance that we are likewise her subjects. Their fluctuating satins, the swags of laurel-green curtain behind them and the late June evening clouds all rise and fall to an inner rhythm that is unmistakeably amorous. To view this painting is to get tossed up in that convulsion, but it’s also to recognise that its wellsprings do not belong to ...”

“... a rare instance of effective political improvisation on his part. Less astutely, Brown brought Peter Mandelson back into the cabinet, despite their volatile relationship and Mandelon’s history of personal scandals. As political correspondent for the New Statesman, Macintyre was one of the facilitators of this ‘imaginative move’, he tells us, a role ...”