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“... from The Shepherd’s Calendar largely as they first appeared in Blackwood’s. In A Queer Book Peter Garside has chosen to use Hogg’s manuscripts as his copy-text, where these seem to offer something like a final version. On occasion, however, he produces composite texts put together from more than one manuscript, or from a manuscript combined with a ...”

“... poet’s conversion. Dante, however, invents the tale that Statius became a Christian after reading Virgil’s Fourth Eclogue, a ‘messianic’ poem from around 42 BCE interpreted by St Augustine as a prophecy of Jesus. So, like a man carrying a light behind his back, Virgil saves others though he himself is damned. Statius confesses that he kept his ...”

“... dressed in a sober grey suit and waistcoat’. He would order a Gibson cocktail and sit at the bar reading the morning papers. Around 11, he would usually be joined – according to Aburish – by Bill Eveland, who worked undercover for the CIA in the Middle East for a number of years. Around noon, John Mecklin of Time magazine would appear, soon to be ...”

“... arts series Monitor in 1962, it purported to follow a day in the life of four young artists: Boty, Peter Blake, Derek Boshier and Peter Phillips. For Mellor, growing up in ‘meagre’ circumstances in the East Midlands, London as the Sixties started to swing was a revelation, ‘a vision of something wonderful’. After she ...”

“... refused to join in the struggle and struck up a conversation with another soldier who was calmly reading a book. He found he was talking to a fellow-Parisian. Guy-Bernard Delapierre, an Egyptologist. The two were shortly separated, but he was later handed a note from Delapierre giving him Delapierre’s address in Paris, and they were to become close friends ...”

“... While I was still reading these books, and thinking about them, I chanced to have two annoying near-KGB experiences. A creepy individual named Yuri Shvets published a book called Washington Station: My Life as a KGB Spy in America, which was fully as lurid and preposterous as its title (put out by the ‘respected firm’ of Simon and Schuster) might suggest ...”

“... stilted or quaintly vague, that may be because we no longer know how to read him’. Before reading Wootten’s careful and illuminating analyses of the poems, I would probably have concurred with F.R. Leavis who, in 1932, dismissed de la Mare’s work as a ‘belated’ last throw of the romantic dice, offering the sort of ‘insidious ...”

“... the annotation is purely textual, and explanatory only when the editors need to justify a reading; so anybody who craves the sort of help to be had from, say, the Arden Shakespeare, or the single-play editions of the Oxford, or even from some rival collected editions, will need an even larger desk. And we learn from the Preface, with mixed ...”

“... Paul Foot, now its politics are rightish, its stance prurient, and its key figures Nigel Dempster, Peter McKay and Auberon Waugh. The radical lampoon has become required reading on the magazine syllabus of every Sloane Ranger. Moreover, the Eye, that fearless exposer of the faintest mafia, now runs a comfortable little ...”

“... in London, they were asked if they played chess, did crosswords or knew foreign languages. Those reading Classics were asked if they would like to learn Japanese. There were also experts in modern languages (two were known as ‘the walking dictionaries’) and, by 1943, many mathematicians (six of whom were, or were to become, fellows of the Royal ...”

“... Perhaps it is unEnglish of me to find all this unfunny. After Williams’s poison-brew, Peter Benson goes down like dry white wine. Yet The Other Occupant is a lesser book than the novel he published last year, A Lesser Dependency, both in the sense of being less ambitious and less well-written. A Lesser Dependency set out both to document and to ...”

“... anti-hero’s point of departure as well as his destination, which makes for a less than dynamic reading experience. Although Miller is recorded as having experienced one ‘meltdown’ in the late Seventies, the novel has no other goal than bringing him to another, a secondary rendering of psychic fats. The plot comprises two main strands: Miller’s ...”

“... the Russians, one has to turn to the authoritative and attractively-written book of that title by Peter McCarey. Like Bold, Buthlay attends to links between the linguistic adventurousness of Joyce and that of MacDiarmid: but where Bold relates MacDiarmid’s advocacy of the Caledonian antisyzygy to a generally post-Hegelian consciousness, Buthlay indicates ...”

“... sisters set off to England for the hunting season. Nancy took Bobbie, and Phyllis took her sons Peter and Winkie; they also took horses and a governess or two, and went out with the Pytchley. Nancy met and married Waldorf Astor, who owned the Observer and was MP for Plymouth; his brother John owned the Times. The Astors were so rich that occasionally it ...”

“... Passion the named persons can have only their Gospel words. So Ach mein Sinn (No 19) cannot be ‘Peter’s Aria’ (‘Part 1, centred on Peter, climaxes in his great aria’), quite apart from the fact that it is for tenor and Peter is a bass. ‘Its agony, being formalised in a da capo ...”