“... Sylvia Plath, who records being mesmerised, both by Hughes as a person and by his work. On 3 May 1956 she wrote to her mother to tell her that ‘Ted has written many virile, deep banging poems,’ and in her journal, describing their first meeting, she remembered: ‘And I was stamping and he was stamping on the floor, and then kissed me bang smash on ...”

“... highest thing to be, he later inserts as a quasi-aside the thought that a writer’s earliest work may contain, ‘sometimes in coded ways’, the emotions and impulses that will always govern him. The important, overt indication as to what those emotions and impulses are, and what causes Naipaul’s hostility to ‘Islam’, comes earlier on when he visits ...”

“... in the winter months at least. Come April, a locum had to be found. As a family, the Graces may well have been as loud and competitive in the house as they habitually were on the field, and some of their suburban neighbours found them coarse – ‘Mrs Grace does say such things,’ one wrote in her diary, without, though, telling us what they ...”

“... unbearable to him, whereas the martyr gives up his most precious possession in the hope that good may flow from it. In Christian theology, what determines whether or not you can embrace death in this way is how you have lived. If you have failed in life to divest yourself for the sake of others, you will be trapped like William Golding’s Pincher Martin in a ...”

“... comically courtly virtue of the fact by inserting a new triplet in the Prologue: The country lip may have the velvet touch; Though she’s no lady you may think her such, (A strong imagination may do much.) Such ease is all the more remarkable because Dryden’s first efforts were ...”

“... to put on the shelf next to The Good Companions and Angel Pavement. As such, Where the rivers meet may well, in part, please admirers of those once popular middlebrow monuments. Peter, ‘a member of the upper working class from a background still semi-rural’ (his parents run a pub at Oseney, on the edge of Oxford), is a bright lad whose brightness is ...”

“... shimmering and turbaned place, cooled only by the tutelary presence of Saint Peggy Ashcroft. These may be our preferred Indias, the Indias of spice and hokum, but they are a far, mendacious cry from the country modern Indian writers want to tell us about. Bapsi Sidhwa tells of a time and place of civil unrest, of wrecked friendships and betrayals of trust, of ...”

“... to Mansfield throughout as Katherine) points out that she is ‘of the same sex as my subject. It may be nonsense to believe that this gives me any advantage over a male biographer. Yet I can’t help feeling that any woman who fights her way through life on two fronts – taking a traditional female role, but also seeking male privileges – ...”

“... to the Church Commissioners, who passed Dr Bennett’s essay for publication, is that they may have been lulled into a sense of false security by the nature of the notably anodyne Preface contributed by Dr David Edwards, the present Provost of Southwark, to the 1983-85 Crockford, the first to appear under the new dispensation. How it was that they ...”

“... also suggests that in practice the great religious holidays – whatever Protestant visitors may have thought – did more economic good than harm, since ‘festivals generated work, and they were also occasions when it was possible to advertise and sell.’ Mackenney’s well-informed and vigorous study, which carries the reader along despite its many ...”

“... phrase ‘among his host of ghosts’ for dans la troupe de ses fantômes is the one thing that may cause a raised eyebrow or two, but even this presumably bears the stamp of Yourcenar’s authority. Marguerite Yourcenar is that rarity, a Stoic among novelists, but fiction is much more commonly a form for Epicureans. Outside the realist and naturalist ...”

“... one ‘turn’d for ... upright Ends’, no ‘jesting with truth’. One man’s truth, however, may be another man’s heresy, and Swift, with unequalled trenchancy, attacked all empirical and materialist progressivism as dangerous psychological projection. He puts Gulliver, not only in an academy of mad scientists, but in a utopia – Houyhnhnmland ...”

“... resulted in the first battles of the American Revolution. Whatever the Catholics, Jews and Muslims may remember of a time when there were no Catholics, Jews and Muslims in Wayland, they have no excuse now – thanks to Professor Fischer – for not being able to find out all about Paul Revere and how the Revolution began. Some books promise more than they ...”

“... even the FBI satisfied itself of this after years of investigation – he was nevertheless (if I may quote my own memories of him) much more than the generic New Deal ‘progressive’ to which Stowe tries to reduce him. Hammond’s record as a discoverer and developer of talent from 1933 to his death was unparalleled. It rested not only on astonishing ...”

“... points about pseudo-revolutionary repression. He makes much, quite rightly, of the hundreds who may have died trying to float to Miami on inner tubes. He takes for granted, however, the exclusive jump-the-queue asylum granted to Cuban escapees by the US in 1966. Until this shadowy law was dropped on 19 August, and Cubans abruptly found themselves treated ...”