“... used for other purposes. The Enochian alphabet was ‘revealed’ by angels to the magician John Dee in 1583, who soon put it to use in his conjuring activities.These apocryphal alphabets – unreadable, speculative experiments on the borders of writing – wouldn’t be out of place in Literature’s Elsewheres. There’s much common ground between ...”

“... Many others were famous in the history of early Oxford science: Henry Briggs, Thomas Lydyat, John Napier, Edmund Gunter. Almost three quarters of his collection, in fact, was made up of books published during his lifetime, and their range of subject-matter was indeed ...”

“... young Robin was educated at home, where he showed remarkable precocity. His father, who was John Ruskin’s secretary, undertook the task of educating his son himself; Robin received from him a very wide and thorough education – in ancient and modern languages, history, science, music, art. In his Autobiography Collingwood reports having had a certain ...”

“... though, by the wit, honesty and variety with which Enright defines his compromised position. John Bayley makes an interesting comparison in his essay between Larkin’s paradoxical need to fuse in his poetry a recognisable speaking voice with an almost Yeatsian authority and intensity of statement, and Enright’s more leisurely, less aggressive ...”

“... basics of literary criticism, and he aligns himself with similarly inclined critics (Hugh Kenner, John Hollander, Richard Poirier, Lionel Trilling, and above all Empson) who use theory, when they use it at all, for the most part to clear the ground for attentive reading. The phrase which serves as the title of the collection is taken from Paul Valéry’s ...”

“... hated by Catholics, would be accompanied on their patrols by members of the less-hated RUC. Sir John Hermon, former Chief of the RUC, said on BBC TV a few weeks ago that this undertaking was never seriously intended. On the same programme, the officer in charge of the UDR said that the regiment’s assignment was to defeat the IRA, and that they took no ...”

“... Joseph Hotung Gallery is new only in name: it is the familiar Edward VII Gallery, designed by Sir John Burnet and opened by George V in 1914. It is a high-ceilinged room 360 feet in length, running along the north side of the first floor of the BM. Tall windows give onto sky and plane trees, with Montague Place and Senate House providing a sober ...”

“... major character in the novel. Andy identifies the city with his lost father: his father who (like John Betjeman) pointed out that it is one of the finest stone-built cities in the world. As Andy reflects on his personal history, he also charts the city’s evolution: his grandfather worked at Macfarlane’s ironworks, which began the area’s industrial ...”

“... has narrowed its meaning since Shakespeare wrote the Bastard’s great speech about it in King John, where it meant greed, self-interest, the opening bars of capitalism. Adshead’s book belongs to a recently growing genus of works on the history of particular commodities. To be of most value a study of this kind should be a part of general history, joined ...”

“... equality’. He also rejects as the measure of equality the ‘primary goods’ that John Rawls has specified as the objects of distribution in his political theory. Rawls described these as multi-purpose goods that any reasonable human being in most social circumstances would want: they include money and ‘the means to self-respect’. Sen’s ...”

“... who see Connolly’s socialism as evolving out of his Catholicism. Similarly, the arguments of John Newsinger deserve notice: he, like Morgan, believes that Connolly was not in any meaningful sense a Catholic for a long period, but that he nonetheless consciously cultivated a ‘safe’ religious position in order not to alienate the mass of Irish ...”

“... These books are all witness to a hope as old as the Garden of Eden, the hope of a perfect partnership. The full-length biography of Carrington and the edited correspondence of Maynard Keynes and Lydia Lopokova (from 1918 to their marriage in 1925, more volumes to follow) also suggest that there is still a good deal of reading to be done about Bloomsbury ...”

“... to Crofts, one of his old masters at Westward Ho!; a scatter of references in letters to his son John at school (c. 1912) about avoiding chaps who engage in ‘beastliness’; a 1917 letter to an unidentified friend about the friend’s son (or nephew?) who has obviously just been expelled from Westward Ho! for said ‘beastliness’; and a 1928 entry from ...”

“... his reinstatement on the Navy List is promised. Despite such plots O’Brian’s Aubrey novels, as John Bayley has said in this paper, are ‘emphatically not adventure stories, or the sort of mechanical marine thrillers which sprang up in the wake of C.S. Forester’. For one thing, delicacy and generosity of feeling are constant themes in O’Brian’s ...”

“... of a dedicated ferocity that make the behaviour of Jean Rhys and her companions, so deplored by John Bayley recently in these pages, look like the Teddy Bears’ Picnic. Oh! That Imar O’Hagan, with his trained snails and his ‘fridge full of blocks of frozen vampire bats “like an airline breakfast of compressed gloves” ’. It describes a city in the ...”