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“... other people were supposed to inhabit. And within Belknap’s book the formulation allows him to read Dostoevsky’s Crime and Punishment as both lurid and subtle at the same time, a feat not too many critics have achieved. Raskolnikov is not living a double life; he is caught up in two incompatible plots, the one he has devised for himself, and the one ...”

“... go on turning the pages’. The prejudice is unsurprising; one of the inevitabilities of having to read more than a hundred novels concertinaed over a summer is that novels without much plot tend to languish. Suddenly everything should be shorter, even Ian McEwan. More troubling was Professor Carey’s opinion that Nick Hornby’s How to Be Good is ‘a very ...”

“... out about the types and processes of metamorphosis that were described in the tradition and to read them in order to throw light on changing ideas about persons and personhood.’ It is a vast subject (what work of art or literature doesn’t have something to say about metamorphosis?) but also an elusive one, as Warner is well aware, comparing herself to ...”

“... translation from Voltaire, the pentameter couplets are balanced in fine Augustan fashion; but they read like second-hand Pope. Hecht imitating Pope is never as good as Pope imitating Pope, partly because Hecht feels it necessary to sneak in a groaner or two: ‘How shall this best of orders come to be?/I am all ignorance, like a PhD.’ Such long poems are ...”

“... the Morrisons pretty well considering all there was on all sides to dissemble.’ One had only to read between the lines. In any case, it is hardly fair to say of Thompson’s biography – which, before it arrives at the Morrison period, covers 64 years, during 43 of which Frost was faithfully married to Elinor – that its ‘heart’ is ‘based on a ...”

“... the stories of the students’ lives in the Islamic Republic of Iran and what happens when they read banned Western classics, in particular Lolita and Pride and Prejudice. The book was enormously successful on its appearance in March 2003, winning praise from Margaret Atwood (‘All readers should read it’) and Susan ...”

“... punk, but I’d caught up with ska. I liked Burroughs, Kerouac, Borges, Kafka and Orwell. I’d read Colin Wilson’s The Outsider. I’d read Camus, in translation. I wore Dr Martens boots. At home I secretly drank my mum and dad’s Martini and in the pub I pretended to like beer. I watched a lot of TV. I liked ...”

“... poet which became an enduring model of the Late Victorian official Life and Letters, according to Richard Altick’s history of literary biography: ‘as a work of biographical art, it is as monstrous and marmoreal as a tomb in Westminster Abbey.’ And even blander than the repainted Laurence portrait. Although, inevitably, there is a good bit of factual ...”

“... of ‘political thought’ would have to consist of several volumes (how many?) designed to be read concurrently. Within the Latin ecumene, the problem of selection does not disappear. Professor Burns indicates his awareness that ‘the history of political thought’ in this era could have been written as consisting of a number of ‘interrelated but ...”

“... plod along as lawyers, journalists, publishers, bankers, writers, public servants. None of us can read this biography without a sense of intellectual degeneracy and that is our inheritance, together with his love of adventure and weakness for tobacco. What has been lost in the intervening fifty years is not money or social position or Mr Baldwin’s car or ...”

“... on the Continent. In the early 17th century libraries of more than a thousand volumes were rare: Richard Bancroft, archbishop of Canterbury between 1604 and 1610, had perhaps the largest of the day at around six thousand volumes. A hundred years later, John Moore, bishop of Ely, had more than thirty thousand books. Moore’s collection is now a star of ...”

“... finds that Gilded Age Administration less corrupt than had been believed. The Conservative pundit Richard Brookhiser gave us Founding Father: Rediscovering George Washington (1996) in order to paint a portrait of integrity and rectitude as an exemplar of what was wanting in the Clinton White House. Books about Franklin D. Roosevelt and, above all, Abraham ...”

“... fiction, rather than visiting Joan Crawford in her film-set caravan, accompanied by Lord Snowdon. Richard Wollheim and Colin McInnes had been overheard talking about him on the balcony at a party. ‘There we were,’ said McInnes afterwards, ‘like two Chinese civil servants in the snow, talking about the Emperor.’ He shared an office with Meriel ...”

“... has nothing to do with air or water, and that accent is only part of the story. In different ways, Richard Burton and Aneurin Bevan (Beaverbrook’s ‘Bollinger Bolshevik’) were also champion putters-on. So, in a rather minor key, were at least half the members of my mother’s extended family. In a putting-it-on competition between Roy Jenkins and my ...”

“... in concluding that ‘in spite of its faults it seems to me better and more tragic every time I read it.’ Poetry must in its own way be perfect, but the novel, as Lawrence saw, is ‘incapable of the absolute’, and gains in its own ways from its lapses and imperfections. Peter Levi has a poet’s eye for Pasternak’s poetry, which he translates ...”