“... impetus of Pavese’s verse into English: you find yourself drawn into his versions, compelled to read them through. But too often, as here, he softens the expressive bluntness of the language. To give up the repetition of ‘la donna’ is to lose the way the woman’s presence imposes itself on the speaker’s awareness, as she changes from being the object ...”

“... Peter Hennessy’s new book hasn’t persuaded me that its central preoccupation, the current dispute over prime ministerial power and its extent, is not sterile and, indeed, rather boring – yet it is a splendid read. The truth is that the Westminster system is quite inadequately democratic and transparent, and Hennessy is, if anything, too respectful and conventional in his proposals about how the office might be reformed ...”

“... really has the power to renew itself, I’d better write something for these younger chaps to read ... I planned a longish poem, about 750 lines, which I finished about a month ago and have just revised and sent off to Poetry Chicago today. I believe it is the best thing I’ve done.’ As we close in on the centenary of Basil Bunting’s birth at ...”

“... reading matter, the titles she was happy to display. Alan Bennett’s Diaries and, of course, Peter Ackroyd’s gold-brick biography of Blake. Bennett, Ackroyd and Jonathan Miller – these were the figures who mattered most. The Christmas parcels of English literature. Enough of threadbare bohemia, paranoid narcissism, chemical tourism through the Third ...”

“... lives, talk and attitudes of the vast majority of the population in past times belong to what Peter Laslett calls, hauntingly, the world we have lost. The Diary of Thomas Turner claims notice as a sustained insider’s account of how ordinary people lived from day to day in a pre-industrial English village. On Thursday 27 December 1756 two of Turner’s ...”

“... of this single identity appeared to have been provided by the copyright line, which simply read: Richard Pennington. It seems unthinkable that a sometime publisher and printer would have allowed such a line to appear had he wished to float a forgery – he would have used the more discreet tactics of Madame Solario or Letters of an Indian Judge to an ...”

“... Orchid, which had appeared the year before, and received unusually approving notices. I had not read The Military Orchid, partly because there was a good deal to do reviewing other books, partly because (being in that respect like Wyndham Lewis’s Tarr, for whom ‘the spring was anonymous’) I thought a work much concerned with botany sounded off my ...”

“... worse he was spiking his diatribes with personal insults against a much-loved primate, Jakob Peter Mynster, who had died the year before. Kierkegaard had, until then, always appeared to share in the general veneration for Bishop Mynster. But now that Mynster was dead, and magnificently buried following a ceremony across the road in the Church of Our ...”

“... voice came through to my Commons Office-cum-Cupboard, and rather peremptorily told me to read an article in the New Statesman, ‘The Death of Miss Murrell’ by Judith Cook. Some two days later, since I read the New Statesman and the London Review of Books on trains and aircraft between London and Scotland, I ...”

“... the work as he made it. This distancing is symbolic of his social situation, for his life can be read as an attempt to reduce the distance separating an artisan such as himself and an aristocrat. Jonathan Brown begins his biographical essay with the assertion that ‘The life and career of Diego Velázquez revolved around a weighty dilemma – how could he ...”

“... information, then – as Gramsci said of Machiavelli – it is mainly the outsiders who need to read about it in books. This sort of cynical wisdom contrived to make doctrinaire Utilitarianism look gauche, just as the appeal to history was intended to make it sound glib. The historians were certainly serving their own purposes when they claimed to have an ...”

“... then she took it and popped it into her handbag unopened, saying that she did not wish to read it.’ His book deserves a better ...”

“... and obsessions turned out to be so strangely decisive, the most illuminating book I have read is Gerald Newman’s The Rise of English Nationalism. As many others have done, Newman describes how English patriotism arose from below during the 18th century and was directed specifically against France and Frenchness, but he lays particular stress on ...”

“... the opposite danger is lack of perspective, since, whenever it was written, the text is here to be read in hindsight and judged accordingly. It should be said at once that this is more than an ephemeral feat of instant publishing. Seldon has written the indispensable historical guide to the Major Government: its triumphs and its failures, its achievements and ...”

“... dinner.’ The daily life and the morbid poetry are out of kilter, and when Maude’s verses are read by her friends, it was to ‘the amazement of everyone what could make her poetry so broken-hearted as was mostly the case’. Some wondered ‘if she really had any secret source of uneasiness’, and here a nicely arched eyebrow is being raised at the ...”