“... means that if you scratched his back, he was under no obligation to scratch yours: Edwin Morgan, Robert Garioch and Ian Hamilton Finlay are three Scottish poets whose work he dismisses where he might have been expected, if only for tactical reasons, to approve it. It is the same with Scottish literature of the past. MacDiarmid is almost alone among its ...”

“... and turned over to small, highly participatory sub-units – a possibility explored in Robert Dahl’s new book Dilemmas of Pluralist Democracy: but if we restrict the discussion to those issues handled at the national level, the burden of proof is on those who would go beyond Schumpeter’s minimal and uninspiring position. There are four major ...”

“... to decide how seriously he should take his themes. As leader of a group of expensively educated young men, Auden was protected against ‘all contact with serious critical standards’.The fact that Leavis offered the precise critical challenge didn’t mean that it was taken up in his terms, or indeed in any other terms. At a fairly early point, Auden ...”

“... in May 1940, as a result of the failed Norwegian campaign, his stock had sunk fairly low but, as Robert Self points out, he continued to serve in Churchill’s government to such good effect that the latter made no bones about saying that Chamberlain was ‘the best man’ he had, ‘head and shoulders over the average man in the administration’. Attlee ...”

“... you go back to the hotel?’); sexual longing, confusion and mad passions; teenage marriage, young motherhood, and a Doll’s House bolt; soaring ambition accompanied by wracking self-doubt; an arduous climb to the top that left her competitors littered on the slopes; mortal illness, and near miraculous recovery; heroism, heartache, more heroism and more ...”

“... been faced, with such a choice? In 1917 or thereabouts, Siegfried Sassoon confided to his friend Robert Graves that he was planning to ‘go public’, as a decorated front-line officer, with what he knew about real conditions on the Western Front. Graves had him put away for ‘shell-shock’, for his own good. That was certainly a betrayal of a friend ...”

“... movie, which is full of stock English types, one of them lazily played by the American sex-object, Robert Redford. He should have taken lessons in the British accent from the hard-working Marlon Brando. Firmly hooked to the movie, this elaborate Century edition of Out of Africa is packed with illustrations which will appeal to nostalgic movie-weepers but have ...”

“... Barzun, R.P. Blackmur, Alfred Kazin, Lionel Trilling, Delmore Schwartz, Allen Tate, Kenneth Burke, Robert Fitzgerald, Leslie Fiedler and John Crowe Ransom – this last its founder as a school of literary criticism ‘to teach those who teach it’. Marianne Moore, in Brooklyn, had a quieter time, but was just as much in touch with them all through friends and ...”

“... I suspect it could be traced back to the moment (which he has recorded in fiction) when as a young soldier he disembarked in wartime India, to be astounded by the heat and the seething, alien mass of humanity. The best things in Helliconia Spring are vivid descriptions of cold, wet and warmth. But as in other SF and fantasy epics, the too-large scale ...”

“... the ‘last outburst of peasant rage to result in murder’. The Village of Cannibals, like Robert Darnton’s Great Cat Massacre, confirms the degree to which social historians, building on the Annales tradition, have embraced cultural anthropology and the study of popular political language over time. Darnton calls it ‘history in the ethnographic ...”

“... think tanks and publications. Murdoch’s formal politics weren’t always this way. As a young man reading PPE at Oxford he wrote admiring letters to the Australian Labor prime minister, Ben Chifley. In 1970 the Sun supported Harold Wilson and in 1972 Murdoch’s papers, notably the Australian (a national daily he had founded in 1964), supported ...”

“... in ‘the Village’. It was, he records with a Wordsworthian flourish, ‘a good time to be young in America and magical to be young in New York’. At Doubleday, a firm whose primary interest was its book club business, Epstein learned valuable lessons about mail order and how to package the product. Two years ...”

“... problem, it emerged, was to do with Tate’s complicated love-life. In his youth, as an ambitious young literary blade, Tate was known to have enjoyed some indiscretions (vide his ‘discovery’ of Laura Riding) but it was not until his later years – post-1940; he was born in 1899 – that he achieved Great Lover status. This randiness of Tate’s was ...”

“... shipwreck, showmanship, early death – also bring to mind the life and career of Robert Louis Stevenson, another Scottish writer who looked at human adventure as a brand of metaphysics. Nowadays, people with a heart for proper adventure (or ‘extreme sports’) like to load themselves with equipment and dive into the ocean looking for ...”

“... and the Keatsian ‘long poem’. The kind of story which flows from A to Z is clearly not what young poets have in mind when they speak of ‘a renewed interest in narrative’. Endymion is not the ‘Polar Star’ of their poetry, though Fenton’s minor masterpiece ‘A Vacant Possession’ may, and conceivably should, be what they strive to ...”