“... technical. He rightly saw – he discovered in practice – that his art would amount to precious little if he couldn’t find ways to keep the specifically English forms of landscape mooning alive in his colour and space. One thing the Tate retrospective brought home to me was the depth of Nash’s attachment as a young man to Blake, and to the Rossetti ...”

“... him around for a year. Each morning, he later told John Gerassi, he would greet them: ‘My little ones, how did you sleep?’ He got used to the crabs, but other sea creatures – molluscs in particular – remained objects of horror. Sliminess had something to do with it. Being and Nothingness (1943) concludes with the idea of the visqueux. Sliminess ...”

“... that vagrants lead lives almost as complex as those of cultural commissars. Pete Townshend’s little collection of stories, released on the same label, did not require a pundit to explain how a deaf ex-addict rock musician brought back the goods from his twenty-year nightmare of fame and lunacy. A chess-playing wino? That’s another ball-game. The ...”

“... to his theme the work of Sir Leonard Woolley. As it happens, my father was a relative of Sir Arthur Evans, who led the excavation of Knossos, and Woolley was Evans’s deputy for a period. As secretary to Sir William Willcocks, the Imperial engineer responsible for the construction of dams on the Tigris and the Euphrates, my father was in a position to ...”

“... public meetings with his views on the war, and the expected riots turned into no more than a little mild heckling. On a more personal level, his system can be seen working hilariously. When the Secretary of the Dramatists’ Club wrote to suggest, in view of the objection of several members to his views on the war, that he should ‘absent himself’ for ...”

“... City of the Dead, a City of the Living’. Here everything happens inside the overcrowded little house of Moreke, a jobbing gardener. A stranger, a man with a gun, comes to lodge with Moreke, his wife and baby. Moreke feels in duty bound to give him shelter. For a week the wife watches him as she does her crochet. ‘The tiny flash of her steel hook ...”

“... which the subject could himself have read without perplexity (for example, those by P. D. Edwards, Arthur Pollard, John Halperin, R. C. Terry, Geoffrey Harvey), there are structuralist analyses (for example, Walter Kendrick’s and, in a less doctrinaire manner, James Kincaid’s) and commentary with a feminist slant (by Juliet McMaster, for instance). Shirley ...”

“... the names appeared in books; and what was known of them in official circles seems to have made little impression. Bruno Bettelheim tells us that from 1939 to 1942 it was impossible to get the camps and the SS taken seriously. Bettelheim was imprisoned before the war in Dachau and Buchenwald, and has given his story in The Informed Heart. From personal ...”

“... a case not only of Hamlet without the prince but Hamlet without the play. In most of the volumes little attention is paid to the artistry of the drama, ideas quite often take a back seat to historical information, and critical judgments are sparse. Some of the obscure plays dealt with are probably pretty dreadful, but nobody seems to want to say so. These ...”

“... and continues, ‘this assertion … was only too open to arithmetical correction, and one Arthur T. Froggatt, in a letter to the Musical Times a few months later, attempted a more accurate count: “In the 31 published trios there are 744 bars in which the cello part differs from the pianoforte bass – an average of 24 bars to a trio.”’ But ...”

“... by Irwin Glusker with Kristen Reilly and Christian van Rosenvinge. Manufacture directed by Arthur Hamparian and Stuart Benick. Production editing by Rosalyn T. Badalamenti’ etc. The resemblance to Close Encounters of a Geological Kind is reinforced by the reader’s discovery that the special effects were done in England: ‘Geological colour ...”

“... amounts of strong emotion are ascribed to historical actors about whose feelings we can know very little. The handful of details that survive about Henry VIII’s childhood are spun into assertions about his longing for his dead mother; apparently his first marriage took place in her oratory because he ‘still needed to feel her presence’. His encounter ...”

“... this new Oxford Book cordially. Her ironical appearance in it follows immediately after that of Arthur Machen. Here the author of The Children of the Pool (1936) gets hot under the collar on the subject of psychoanalysis: From the simplest and most obvious dreams, the psychoanalyst deduces the most incongruous and extravagant results. A black savage tells ...”

“... he set himself to master Latin, Greek and Hebrew. Still regularly hungry, he spent part of the little money that came to him on his mother’s death to buy a Hebrew Bible. He supported himself by teaching during the day what he had learned the night before, and learned enough to teach by chewing raw turnips and even sand to keep himself awake. Moving on to ...”

“... confided to his journal: ‘Up and at my chamber all the morning doing business and also reading a little of L’Escolle des filles, which is a mighty lewd book, but yet not amiss for a sober man once to read over to inform him in the villainy of the world.’ Let us put aside the question of how Pepys could have been oblivious of what is comically transparent ...”