“... far beyond the circle of their professional colleagues. One such is the evolutionary biologist Richard Dawkins. Significantly, Dawkins’s books defy classification in terms of our specialist categories: professional monograph, student text, popular book, etc. The Selfish Gene (1976) was at once a key document of the so-called ‘sociobiological ...”

“... It is useful to be able to see this essay again in the company of Eliot, Tate and, above all, Richard Ellmann, whose 1954 elucidation of A Vision restored a balance to the discussion of Yeats’s ideas which the pseudo-Augustan iconoclasm of Yvor Winters was not sufficient to upset. Elizabeth Cullingford’s selection of essays on the poems of 1919-1935 ...”

“... place in Marin County, California – ‘the golden land’ – in 1975, and many of those whom Richard Levine talked to claimed to have seen it coming, since it was well-known that Mrs Olive and her adopted daughter hated each other. Being a minor at the time, Marlene served only three years in a Youth Authority institution, and, now at liberty, has ...”

“... as an engraver and his extreme credulity. Even Blake was sceptical of his fervent devotion to Richard Brothers, the self-appointed Prince of the Hebrews and Nephew of the Almighty, and to Joanna Southcott, the putative mother of the Messiah. None of this affected Sharp’s career, nor his ability to turn out masterly reproductive engravings of the best ...”

“... rhetoric only, but no one could be sure, and in the meantime Chamberlain was caricatured as the English Robespierre. A second comparison with Tony Benn also presents itself. Chamberlain, too, abandoned in middle age the politics of his youth. But where Benn was born again as a socialist, Chamberlain was a convert to imperialism. That ‘Radical Joe’ would ...”

“... take it seriously. We find Kingsley on the golf-course, discussing the problem with his colleague, Richard Short, while they wait for ‘the brisk, serious teenagers’ of Edinburgh to finish with the hole before them. Short says: ‘You’re on a real winner. Even if it is a total red herring, spontaneously resolving cancer is big news. The press will be on ...”

“... Demarests are divorced, and only live together in their house, which looks like a stage-set for an English country hotel, because it saves them money; ‘the war, which was causing so much misery elsewhere by separating lovers and fragmenting family life, had thrust them into undesired proximity.’ Poor Kay, their daughter, at 35 is rootless, moneyless and ...”

“... he has been affected by Miroslav Holub, whom he greatly admires, and who can sound like this in English: Inside there may be growing An abandoned room, Bare walls, pale squares where pictures hung, a disconnected phone, feathers settling on the floor the encyclopedists have moved out and Dostoevsky never found the place Lost in a landscape Where only ...”

“... this isn’t false, despite the immediate catch that his greatest follower, Anthony Caro, is English. Yet it does play too neatly into the usual story of Modernist art: that it was smashed by Fascism and totalitarianism in prewar Europe, then triumphally restored in postwar America as the analogue of American Freedom. A good show disturbs settled ...”

“... the Younger, almost skeletally lanky, nose pointed, chin receding, is the type of the aristocratic English silly ass; Napoleon, short, dark, goggle-eyed, that of the greasy wop in some Little England bestiary. But they are much more than stereotypes: each is also a portrait. Gillray’s genius for satiric likeness peoples his stage with human beings, not with ...”

“... and came downstairs, and made a careful decision about where to sit for the morning and read the English poets, or the harsh denunciations of war and capitalism that I had brought with me. On the second or third day, I noticed a girl of my age leap up from her chair, cross the road in front of the hotel, and walk rapidly towards the sea. She moved with great ...”

“... returned to the rich West, and able to talk passionately about it, in German, French and English. He had no interest in administration, and tested to breaking point the goodwill of his supporters, with what was either brilliant impulsiveness or selfish unreliability. He was huge in Switzerland, big in Germany and well known in France, but he never ...”

“... authenticity’. This demonstration of ‘the terrible, the magnificent importance and urgency of English literature’ is as baleful as it is irresistible. Ellis would call this representation a travesty. He remembers Leavis the teacher as lofty but ‘endlessly indulgent’. ‘I never heard him utter a harsh word.’ Admirers and antagonists agree ...”

“... about the craft, if that is the right word, of highbrow reviewing as it does about Eliot. On the English side one notices a steady reduction in pomposity, signalled by the disappearance of the reviewer’s plural first-person pronoun – a harmless convention that can be irritating when it is clear that a perfectly ordinary individual, not a king or even a ...”