“... 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 ...”

“... again that don’t apply But I’ve gotta use words when I talk to you.One of the side effects of reading through this edition’s extraordinarily wide-ranging and inclusive notes is the periodical rising of a Sweeney-like urge to declare: ‘That don’t apply.’ Like Sweeney, every poem has got to use words, and those words will also necessarily have been ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... in which print triumphs over scribal culture have been eclipsed by a recognition of their overlap; Peter Stallybrass’s work on ‘printing-for-manuscript’ shows how popular printed texts such as almanacs actively encouraged handwritten interventions: one from 1566 offers itself as a space for anyone ‘that will make & keepe notes of any actes, deedes, or ...”

“... has divided Straussians: the purists, mainly from Chicago and the East Coast, accept this dismal reading; a second strain, most prominent in southern California at the Claremont Institute (which publishes the Claremont Review of Books), solves the problem by emphasising the high ideals articulated in the Declaration of Independence. Mansfield was a friend of ...”

“... up the idea in asides: ‘It’s the whole gay thing, isn’t it,’ Will remarks to a boyfriend reading The Go-Between, ‘the unvoiced longing, the cloistered heart.’ The most extended and moving treatment of the theme comes with Will’s visit to the opera in the company of his grandfather: the opera is Britten’s Billy Budd. Interval discussion of the ...”