“... 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 ...”

“... Brazil and the political status of the Golan Heights. They are prime movers of the world of today. Peter Pringle, formerly of the Sunday Times, now of the Observer, and James Spigelman, with civil service experience inside Gough Whitlam’s Government in Australia, have put together a remarkably well-informed, coherent and readable survey of this vast ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... poetry as a kind of mental flossing. The message is slick and pretty as an ad for Colgate: regular reading of poetry keeps you sparkling, even if it sometimes seems a bit of an effort. Keep it up and you will learn to enjoy the experience. It will help you in ways you never imagined. You will see the benefits into old age and beyond. This has less to do with ...”

“... doing and her desiring at the same time. It would create, as David Trinidad is quoted as saying in Peter Steinberg’s introduction, ‘a movie of her life’. Still, in the end, we must take a point of view. The penultimate line of the chronology reads: ‘11 February 1963: Protects children then dies by suicide.’ It is revealing, that textual arm around ...”

“... ones. The Professor’s House centres on the memories of an ageing historian, Napoleon Godfrey St Peter, and much of the book – the entire middle section, in fact – focuses on St Peter’s loving recollections of his former student Tom Outland, a prodigy and inventor who was killed in the First World War. The novel also ...”

“... a line. ‘There is nothing in the world I fear more,’ he wrote, ‘than being overestimated.’ Reading Greek Cultural History a century later, it seems clear the professionals were mistaken, while Nietzsche’s judgment seems quite sound. Astonishment is perhaps the most immediate response to this selection, which amounts to barely a quarter of the ...”

“... I (1649), Cromwell was goaded to ever greater wickedness by the New Model Army chaplain Hugh Peter, his sidekick ‘i’the Machiavilian world’: the future Lord Protector’s outsize red toper’s nose, a staple of royalist humour, eventually takes on celestial dimensions as a comet portending Charles’s doom. Cromwell’s avowed republicanism masks ...”

“... Benevolence is a rare Quality among us. Sensibility indeed we have to spare – what novel-reading Lady does not over flow with it to the great annoyance of her Friends and Family – Her own sorrows like the Princes of Hell in Milton’s Pandemonium sit enthroned bulky and vast – while the miseries of our fellow creatures dwindle into pygmy ...”

“... a strong sense of the impossibility, or at least the extreme difficulty, of writing a novel worth reading. This seems to be in part everyday fear of self-exposure, for which, in interviews, she tends to blame a hypercritical mother, and in part ambivalence about seeking a mass audience. On top of that, she has a nasty case of belatedness with regard to her ...”

“... to be collected in this area which can stir the dullest spirit. I have to confess that before reading Renate Blumenfeld-Kosinski’s Not of Woman Born, I had never thought about what lay behind the story of Caesar, of Caesarean birth, and of Macduff ‘from his mother’s womb/Untimely ripp’d’. What I had failed to realise – though one realises as ...”

“... of them rejected all historical applications of psychoanalysis as inherently unreliable. Yet as Peter Gay has aptly pointed out, insofar as every historian operates with a theory of human nature, every historian is inescapably an amateur psychologist. The choice is not whether to use psychology or not, but whether to borrow the insights of professional ...”

“... Upon Don Quixote and Rhenanus’s adaptation of Tom-kis’s Lingua) and illustrations (the elder Peter Breughel’s Mascarade D’Ourson et de Valentin as well as the younger’s Village Fair), so that the old points emerge with new emphasis. The second half of the book gives critical readings of The Spanish Tragedy, Mucedorus, Edward II, Dr Faustus and ...”