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“... God Himself. As Lewis notes, this would be ‘a claim of far-reaching implications’. Indeed, it may have implications for the fundamentalist Muslim Khilafa movement so active in Britain today. Chapter Six of The Arabs in History was prefaced by a quotation from Rimbaud’s Illuminations, though its title, ‘The Revolt of Islam’, echoed that of ...”

“... that Pound-as-Propertius was criticising. This would have been news to Pound. The poem’s ‘I’ may flit between Pound in 1919 and Propertius in 20 bc, but the point of the ventriloquism was to get the reader in 1919 or 2016 to recognise their own ‘now’: to see how empires – Roman, British, capitalist – corrupt public taste and shrink ...”

“... himself disciplining those members of his flock who were influenced by Tom Paine or by the prophet Richard Brothers (‘God’s nephew’). He published one tract entitled The Moral Law not Injured by the Everlasting Gospel. That might seem to take us closer to Blake but in fact it does not, since if Blake had written such a tract its title would have been ...”

“... at either end of the day, is the one modern photographers of buildings and landscapes wait for. It may be rare, and more common in the South than the North, but you can experience it once in a while at almost any latitude between the Mediterranean and the Arctic Circle. What had at first to be seen through the eyes of Claude was, in effect, waiting to be ...”

“... disease. For a while nanny preserved the fiction that she saw nothing, knew nothing, and she may indeed have been so absorbed in the great news that this was no pretence, but I knew very well that this was something only my brother could have got away with. After a while, she lowered the paper as if to reason with my brother, who was now signalling to me ...”

“... years, Wharton must be regarded as immortal. As far as I know, I never met either, although I may have swapped punches or half-pints with one or other in the mid-Fifties, when I was one of the Daily Express interlopers in the back bar of the King and Keys. But what they both describe is the story of my life as well as theirs. Both books tell the story of ...”

“... would be graceless to grumble; and the cold eye seems disconcertingly aware of what our reactions may be, frequently addressing us as ‘Reader’, with a little flip of the wrist. In any case, the reader interested in the American stage and screen in the Thirties would certainly be gripped by the last quarter of the book, for Mary McCarthy’s first husband ...”

“... of his audience’s living morality into Tolstoy’s canonical fiction is very like what readers may feel who prefer their village vignettes drawn with a sharper pen. The breadth of Hocking’s sympathy imposes a strain. Even the voice in the book which comes closest to being the author’s – that of Michael’s aunt, a writer, typically found suppressing ...”

“... poems. His work exhibits little of the ostentatious virtuosity of better-known formalists such as Richard Wilbur and Anthony Hecht, with whom he is so often, and rather unfortunately, grouped. Rather, Justice’s poems delicately induce the hypnotic state that Bishop described as her artistic ideal in a letter to Anne Stevenson: ‘What one seems to want in ...”

“... terrorist attack, I often wonder what these people hope to achieve. In a depressingly timely book, Richard English tries to answer that question for a number of important cases, in order to address the broader question of his title. First, he has to specify what would count as ‘working’, and then he has to look at the historical facts to determine what the ...”

“... perfunctory kisses’ and ‘breath that stank of beer and caries and onions’. The ‘au pair’ may have been a whitish lie.Trev wanted desperately to do the right thing by his housemaid, and it is not inconceivable that he was sent to the Hermitage – as she was sent ‘into London somewhere’ – to separate them. While he was at the Hermitage, he heard ...”

“... Barton, ranging from American luminaries like Jonas Barish and Stephen Orgel to newcomers like Richard Rowland (who contributes a thumpingly good piece on Heywood). Shakespeare is still the most challenging object in the literary canon, the most generous with meaning and, at the same time, the most apt to find out folly in those who would interpret ...”

“... On 22 February 1965, the fifth month of Harold Wilson’s first ministry, Richard Crossman recorded the following in his Diaries of a Cabinet Minister: Then Harold Wilson raised the issue of Anthony Howard. He has just been appointed by the Sunday Times to be the first Whitehall correspondent in history, looking into the secrets of the Civil Service rather than leaking the secrets of the politicians ...”

“... to the work of Tolstoy and Dostoevsky, but also condemned as a melodramatic mishmash. First, Richard Bernstein (last December in the New York Times) called it ‘a startling, piercing work of fiction with a strong claim to being Singer’s masterpiece’. Bernstein kvelled about its ‘largeness, the depth and complexity of its exorbitantly ...”

“... Beatrice Potter was born in 1858 at Standish on the edge of the Cotswolds. Her father, Richard Potter, was a well-to-do (mainly self-made) businessman to whom she was devoted. Relations with her mother seem, however, to have been uneasy: the diary mentions ‘a kind of feeling of dislike and distrust which I believe is mutual ...”